Local news brands to get USA presence as football coverage goes global
Three regional UK news titles are to expand to focus on attracting American audiences to stories about their football clubs.
Reach’s Manchester Evening News, Liverpool.com — a sister title of the Liverpool Echo — and Football.London have begun recruiting for staff to cover the football clubs they report on for American-based ‘soccer’ fans.
It is part of a wider push by Reach to enter the US market, with websites for its national titles the Mirror and Daily Express both launching in America.
The Irish Star will also be launched, aiming for audiences in Ireland and the USA.
The expansion has been led by Group Editor-in-Chief Lloyd Embley and Chief Digital Publisher David Higgerson.
Lloyd said: “The experience and data we’ve gathered over recent years, both on our existing national titles and from launching dozens of news brands from scratch, will ensure we are in a strong position to take advantage of this opportunity to reach millions more readers every day.”
Job ads will now begin to go up on the Reach Careers site.
The US project for the regional titles follows the launch of Liverpool.com in 2019, which aimed to provide a different take on Liverpool FC, primarily for fans in the USA. The Echo’s established LFC team was bolstered, with an expansion of the popular Blood Red podcast into video at the same time.
Both the MEN and Football.London enjoy sizeable American audience already, while Liverpool.com has built up an international audience for LFC coverage alongside the established Liverpool FC coverage on the Echo.
The MEN is one of the largest news websites in the UK, regularly attracting 18m readers a month, while Ipsos Iris data shows that over half the population of Greater Manchester visits the MEN website or app at least once a month. It also has an app dedicated to Manchester United.
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