Estate agents to be offered shares in regional newspaper

News Category: Industry News

Estate agents whose advertising has been keeping a newspaper afloat are to be offered shares in it, in a last-ditch bid to keep it in business.

Chris Bullivant sparked headlines earlier this year when he launched the part-free, part paid-for Birmingham Press earlier this year in opposition to Trinity Mirror titles in the city.

Trinity, rumoured at the time to be downgrading its print offering in the city, retaliated by bringing out a free version of its main paper, the Birmingham Post Lite, and distributing it in the same affluent suburbs that Bullivant had been targeting.

Bullivant then launched the Birmingham Free Press, which is – as the title suggests – a completely free offering, as a sister paper to its Birmingham Press.

Now he has warned he needs more backing from advertisers.

He has invited estate agents to a meeting to discuss forming a consortium that would own part of the Free Press, claiming a similar enterprise in the south of England yielded the estate agent partners £2.2m when it was sold.

Bullivant also claims Trinity Mirror has been offering estate agents full page ads in its titles for only £150, which he describes as “an attempt to remove us from the marketplace”.

He said: “We cannot compete with such rates as they are below the cost of production, and as a small, new business, we cannot continue to sustain the impact that has on our company. A number of my customers have been lured back to Trinity Mirror, and if that continues, we’ll have to close.”
 
At the time of Bullivant’s launch, former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves blogged: “I give it six months.”


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