Manchester Evening News takes sales in house

The Guardian Media Group’s Manchester Evening News has moved it national sales operation in house after 13 years with Trinity Mirror’s regional sales company, Amra.

The new division, which will be headed up by agency sales director Richard Roycroft, follows on from the merging of all sales operations into MEN Media Sales last month.

Moving national sales out of Amra is the latest change since Mark Dodson took over as the group's chief executive last October and embarked on a management restructure which has included a hefty redundancy drive across the company.

As part of the restructuring, managing director Mark Rix took on the 250-strong sales force across print, TV and online with a brief to "simplify" the planning and buying of all of GMG's products in Greater Manchester.

Rix said: "I have nothing but respect for Amra and their past record on our newspaper business speaks for itself. Quite simply, our future strategy requires a fundamental shift in approach in how we take our products to market."

And Rix revealed that the company is in discussions with national advertisers about selling inventory in the paper's MEN Lite edition separately to space in the main paper.

The Lite, which has a distribution of 11,000, is currently offered as a free extra to the daily MEN.

The company's plan to expand distribution of Lite, unveiled last August, has been put on ice while the business is under review.


 

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