The Manchester Evening News has celebrated raising over £1m in less than 24 hours following the fire which destroyed a dogs’ home and killed up to 50 animals.
The MEN launched a Just Giving page within hours of the fire starting on Thursday night. Donations passed the £1m mark on Friday evening.
At time of writing the total stands at £1.4m.
Trinity Mirror digital publishing director David Higgerson said the campaign was a digital journalism success story. It comes as Trinity Mirror rolls out a new digital-first newsroom model across the group.
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He wrote on his blog: "Newsrooms have to foster a culture where snap decisions can be made and chance conversations or ideas put into action within minutes. That is what happened in Manchester last night, coupled with a knowledge of the tools out there with could make an idea happen. Look at the results.
"Had just 30 people donated, and £300 been raised, the experiment would have been chalked down to experience – the sort of ‘launch fast, fail fast’ form of thinking which, due to the complexities and costs of print, have been much harder to implement in the past.”
The Manchester Evening News is the second most popular regional newspaper online, with some 340,000 average daily browsers per day in July according to ABC. This puts it ahead of the Evening Standard and just behind the Liverpool Echo.
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