The Daily Telegraph rebrands Saturday edition in time for rival launches
The Daily Telegraph’s Saturday edition will be rebranded this weekend to be known as The Saturday Daily Telegraph coinciding with the launch of the Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald’s re-launch of its Saturday paper as a compact edition.
News Corp has been making incremental changes to The Daily Telegraph’s Saturday paper over the last month, introducing a new real estate liftout, a “strengthened” carsguide section which combines Friday’s and Saturday’s content to create “one weekly bumper edition”, a revamped version of Inside Edition now known as Saturday Extra and Kidspot as a liftout within the rejuvenated Best Weekend section.
“We’ve been constantly revamping our liftouts for the last few weeks. Carsguide and real estate guide all launched in February and even one in January. For us, the Saturday Daily Telegraph has occurred progressively since the beginning of February, well before our competitor announced any changes to their paper,” general manager marketing for NSW, Lindsay Chappel told Mumbrella.
News of the changes to Fairfax’s papers was first leaked by sister News Corp title the Australian in late January.
The company hopes the rebrand and revamped content will reduce the paper’s circulation “churn rate” which saw The Daily Telegraph’s Saturday edition fall of 10.6 per cent in circulation in the last quarter of 2013 according to the latest round of print circulation figures, with the Sunday Telegraph falling 12.4 per cent.
“All of our rebranding and investing a lot of resources into new content that’s relevant to the readership is all part of trying to really reduce that circulation churn rate,” said Chappel.
While the rebranding of the Saturday edition is occurring this Saturday, a big date for weekend papers with the introduction of publisher Morry Schwart’s The Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Saturday paper relaunching as a compact edition, Chappel says the changes to content haven’t been developed around thinking about what the competitors are doing.
“For us its about making sure there is a 360 degree product in market on the weekend. Our Saturday paper is much more about becoming a tool all members of the population, particularly families, can utilise to help them plan for a busy weekend, it’s much more a planning paper.
“Our Sunday paper is more of a sit back and relax paper, a paper for people to reflect back on the weekend that has been.”
The company is taking that new positioning into a marketing campaign to promote the masthead relaunch, introducing the tagline ‘Kick start Saturday. Kick back Sunday. Weekend. Sorted.’ running across radio, outdoor digital billboards, social media and News Corp Australia assets for the next two weeks.
Chappel said the content in the Saturday and Sunday papers is reflecting this positioning, with clear differences between the two papers.
“One of the big reasons we’ve been revamping and progressively changing the Saturday Telegraph has been to make sure the content we have in the Saturday Paper is really there to add value to our readers and to add value to readers who may not have read us before so they can really clearly see the difference between the papers,” she said.
Miranda Ward
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Well done Mumbrella for giving us the whole story. The Australian’s story in Shari Markson’s “must read” media section omitted to mention the SMH relaunch. Still, it may not have been deliberate. In her sycophantic video interview with Christ Mitchell earlier this week, some of her idiotic questions revealed that she doesn’t actually know much about the media.
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I’m very disappointed the Saturday Herald will now be in tabloid form. I was terribly upset when the daily changed format but believed the saturday paper would stay the same.
What a shame.
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