Liverpool Daily Post relaunches as weekly title

The Liverpool Daily Post has been relaunched today as a weekly title after 156 years in print, with the new edition called simply the Liverpool Post.

The Post – which was originally a six-day paper, but scrapped it's Saturday edition in 2009 – will now publish weekly on a Thursday with a cover price of £1.

Alongside news, the new 100-page edition will contain a 24-page business section, 24-page pull-out culture section, and a sports section that publisher Trinity Mirror said in a release would "move away from straight match reporting and player quotes and provide deeper analysis".

The paper's website, liverpooldailypost.co.uk, has also been redesigned, with "a clean new look", and a free weekday email newsletter launched.

Editor Mark Thomas said: "Throughout our 156 years, we have always been an innovative newspaper, adapting and changing to match the challenges of the times.

"This is the next step in that evolution and the start of an exciting new chapter."

Trinity Mirror called the relaunch a "new phase in the history of Liverpool’s oldest surviving newspaper", designed to "give the paper a future as bright as its past is illustrious".

The switch led to six editorial redundancies from the Daily Post's editorial team – as was expected when the plans were first announced in November – but none were compulsory. A spokesman for Trinity Mirror said the company had extended the consultation period over redundancies beyond the usual 30 days in order to achieve the necessary cuts through voluntary redundancies.

Regarding the redundancy process, Ali Machray, editor-in-chief of Trinity Mirror's Merseyside division, said the publisher had "achieved our objective by setting out to consult as effectively and flexibly as possible, and given the scale of the changes to our publishing portfolio believed that this would be achieved more effectively within an extended time frame.

"This approach proved to be successful and was an excellent example of the management team, staff and unions all working together to reach the best outcome for all concerned."

The most recent Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for the Post – for the first six months of 2011 – show that daily edition averaged sales of 8,217 copies, with 82.8 per cent – 6,807 – of those paid for and the remainder free.

The Post follows a number of regional titles to move from daily to weekly publishing recently. Last year, publisher Northcliffe switched the Lincolnshire Echo, Exeter Express & Echo, Scunthorpe Telegraph and Herald Express in Torquay.

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