Harborough Mail editor leaving after decade at paper
THE MAIL’S editor Brian Dodds is leaving the paper as part of a string of structural changes at the centre.
Johnston Press, parent company of the Harborough Mail and the Lutterworth Mail, is streamlining its papers across the country and introducing new systems to improve its digital media coverage and to reduce its debt burden.
Mr Dodds joined The Mail as editor in October 2001 and will be leaving on Friday, September 28.
He said: “There are exciting changes ahead for The Mail, both in terms of improvements to the design of the paper and in its digital output, but the time has come for me to move on.
“I am proud of the way my teams have served the community and I know I leave behind a group of dedicated and talented people who will continue to do so.”
Earlier this year a number of the company’s daily titles were switched to weeklies, including the Northamptonshire Telegraph, whose editor, Neil Pickford, will now also be in charge of the Mail.
Further redundancies recently saw Mail advertising manager Andy Cox leave and his deputy, Amanda Palfrey, will depart at the end of next week.
The Telegraph’s switch to weekly in May also saw its team of photographers become available to The Mail, which was able to reduce its need to commission a freelance photographer.
Johnston Press is now Britain’s biggest and fastest-growing regional online publisher. Latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) show Johnston Press websites attracted a total of 560,721 browsers on average every day during the first half of 2012 – an increase in the digital audience of 29.3 per cent year on year.
About 10 million visitors a month go to the Johnston Press network and the audience on mobile has doubled from one million in December to more than two million by June.
Comparing with other regional newspaper groups, Trinity Mirror recorded a 14.9 per cent increase (538,152 average daily unique browsers), Northcliffe 6.3 per cent (347,319) and Newsquest 9.4 per cent (499,292).
The Mail’s websites – www.harboroughmail.co.uk and www.lutterworthmail.co.uk – attracted more than 27,000 unique users in August, nearly 16 per cent more than last year. In August, more than 4,700 users accessed the Mail’s mobile phone website.
In the first half of this year, an average of 9,785 copies of the Harborough Mail and Lutterworth Mail were sold every week, a drop of 3 per cent on last year.
The Mail’s newspaper sales performance was ranked 35th best out of more than 300 regional weekly papers in the country, with only 14 recording a year on year sales increase.
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Weather for Market Harborough
Wednesday 19 June 2013
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 13 C to 23 C
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Light rain
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