Digital Publishing
1 min read

‘National newspaper for the north’ closes after five weeks

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Another hopeful newspaper launch has come to grief. The title, called 24 – The North’s National, will cease publication from tomorrow after just five weeks.

Its publisher, CN group, is throwing in the towel because it couldn’t find an audience. “We were proud of the design and content and had encouraging feedback and buy-in from advertisers,” said CN’s editorial director, David Helliwell, “but unfortunately copy sales are just not high enough to justify continuing daily publication.”

He went on to talk about it having “always” been “a calculated risk” to test whether there was a gap in the market “beside the big beasts of the daily market.”

There is something to be said for his honesty in saying: “We launched quickly, failed quickly and learned an awful lot along the way.”

But I wonder if he, or his colleagues, really did take the lesson to heart because he added: “It hasn’t diminished our appetite for trying new publications, be they print or digital.”

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