By Sarah Lagan
The Edinburgh Evening News has undergone a “wholesale revamp” with the intention of getting closer to its community.
Editor John McLellan said he had followed weeklies and smaller
circulation evening papers by homing in on more local stories at grass
roots level.
Lead stories have been reduced in size and there are
more news briefs to give a higher story count, improving the frequency
of stories of direct relevance to individual readers.
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There is
also a stronger focus on reader interaction, with a double-page spread
dedicated to readers’ letters and a reader panel to channel more
opinions into the paper.
McLellan said: “We are trying to be as
proactive as possible in driving opinion into the paper by making it as
easy as possible. We will have more prompts and voxpops asking readers’
opinion.”
He said the smaller evening and weekly papers are more successful than the bigger papers in the battle for circulation.
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“I
think we should take a leaf out their book. They put on sales because
they are so close to their community and we wanted to extenuate that.”
He said the Metro proved there is a demand for quicker news and quicker
updates.
The type has been changed to sans and the masthead has
been moved into a square box rather than running across the top of the
page.
McLellan has been working on the redesign since before the
New Year, with Ally Palmer and Gavin Munro of Palmer Watson. The
Edinburgh Evening News’ circulation is 63,771.
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