An Earlier Day.

Journalism About the only surprise about The New Day closing is that it's happening this quickly. Newspapers and magazines take time to bed in but as Roy Greenslade explains in his column, its publishers Mirror Group stacked the odds against it by making it incapable of covering breaking news satisfactorily and messing up such things as pricing and pre-publicity.

Plus the launch issue was abysmal with a messy content structure, generic listicle articles which looked like they'd been copy/pasted from a website and a lack of seeming to actually do anything particularly different to The Metro or The i.  You don't get a second change at making a first impression.

All of which reminds me that about ten years ago this week another similar experiment, The North-West Enquirer launched.  The idea was to offer a weekly newspaper covering the whole of the region, for people who were interested in what was happening outside of their city, with a strong business, politics and cultural angle.

I loved it and never missed an issue.  Travelling between Liverpool and Manchester for college during the launch period meant that I was probably the key target audience.  Plus there were some brilliant idiosyncrasies, as my review of the first issue reminds me, like carrying four pages of syndicated material from the International Herald Tribune in the middle.

They included Feeling Listless in the blogroll on their website and even mentioned my work in the related column in the paper.  Here and here (the latter a piece about handing in my dissertation).  The Enquirer was especially good at understanding the online community at a time when blogging still seemed like a weird pursuit.

Sadly, within about five months, news came that it was to close due to not reaching sales targets and they weren't even given the opportunity to publish a final paper, the decision having been taken in the week between issues.  One of the journalists emailed me to communicate their disappointment at the decision and I agree with their comments.  It was a great paper that still leaves a hole in the market.

Thanks to the Internet Archive you can relive the good old days.  Versions of the website are still here.