DevonLive and SomersetLive will soon have a new neighboring location after Reach announced plans for a new live brand for Dorset.
The new Dorset Live brand will have its own team of reporters and editors who will cover the entire beautiful county from Lyme Regis to Bournemouth and will also be planning top notch coverage of AFC Bournemouth.
The expansion is part of a wider announcement from Reach Plc that will deliver a local news brand to each county in England and Wales by the end of the year.
In the South West we are also launching live brands for Witshire and Herefordshire and adding new reporters to provide special service to Weston-super-Mare and North Devon.
Across the country, there will also be new live brands in Norfolk, Suffolk, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Rutland and Darlington, as well as additional staff for the editing of MyLondon.
The move will create more than 50 jobs – more than 170 new jobs created for Reach’s regional live sites since early 2020.
Several positions have already been advertised for DevonLive and SomersetLive. We’re hiring one reporter for North Devon and one for Somerset, a content editor for each website, a late-stage regional content editor, and an engagement producer to take care of our social media accounts.
The roles for Dorset, Wiltshire and Herefordshire will go live in the next few days and all will be posted on our job site.
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Jacqui Merrington, South West’s Audience and Content Director, said, “DevonLive and SomersetLive have become established brands in their markets because we respond to what our audience wants to read and we have built a relationship with our readers.
“We will do the same in Dorset and we look forward to meeting our readers and developing a world-class news, sports and entertainment service in the county.”
The decision follows a period of rapid growth for Reach’s regional online brands. Comscore data, released in March, shows 72% of adults in the UK get local news from Reach, up from 67% a year ago. 88% of adults consuming local news in the UK spend time on Reach’s live network.
Reach also has a track record of starting locations in new areas from scratch. In 2020 alone, the company launched 19 new regional locations, including YorkshireLive, which launched in March and had the largest news audience in the county in just six months.
Moving to full English and Welsh coverage at a local level is key to Reach’s customer value strategy, which has grown more than 6 million registered customers in just over a year.
Lloyd Embley, Editor-in-Chief of Reach said, “Over the past 18 months we have significantly increased the number of new websites we have launched as part of our live network, many in areas where we don’t have established print titles.
“Thanks to our redesign of editorial operations over the past year and our customer value strategy, which ensures that we build closer relationships with our readers, we have created a sustainable model for exclusively digital digital journalism.
“The response from new readers to the 2020 launch has been overwhelmingly positive and has given us the confidence to have the entire map of England and Wales ready by the end of this year.
“This is incredibly exciting and strengthens our position as the leading news publisher in the UK with an unprecedented ability to reach audiences through both our national and regional journalism.”