The natural response that The Birmingham Post retreating from being a daily paper to a weekly is that it is a negative and retrograde step. However, I can’t moan as I am as guilty as anyone in allowing this to happen through very rarely buying the daily version.
Now it is possible to buy the paper once a week and have everything in one go I am resolved to do so. Thursday’s first edition has left me feeling much more in touch with the city. It’s a thick old thing and just £1, so great value. If enough of us buy it then we won’t be left with just the Evening Mail as print news in the city. I’m voting ‘yes’ with my lose change.
James
You are not guilty, and neither am I. The Birmingham Post is explicitly aimed at the Business Community, the idea being that in this day and age, if a paper does not have a particular niche which it serves well, and gains the advertising revenue benefit, then it will not survive. Whenever I read the paper I would find the particular strain of Business that the paper was going for to be off-putting, almost telling me that this paper was not for me. Well it turns that that it is – in effect – deliberate.
My hope is that while it will manage to keep catering for its core Business customers, and the advertisers that they attract, it will also find a way to appeal to the more general interested civic reader, like you, like me, and like a fair number of people who may now be buying it once a week.
You can listen to me and Andrew Brightwell discussing this and related issues with the Post’s editor, Marc Reeves, on Rhubarb Radio’s Sunday Local programme (15 November), at least once the technical hitches are ironed out.