Birmingham Mail website launched

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The Birmingham Mail newspaper has launched a new standalone website.

The publication is the latest Trinity Mirror title to step out from under the IC umbrella network of local sites and launch a website named after an individual print publication.

Trinity's Liverpool tiles, The Post and The Echo, were amongst the first to adopt this strategy last year. Birminghammail.net will continue to be linked to the icBirmingham portal through which its online content was previously available.

Its sister paper, The Birmingham Post, will follow it next month with the launch of Birminghampost.net. Other Trinity titles in the Midlands, The Coventry Telegraph and The Sunday Mercury, are expected to follow suit in the coming months.

"IcBirmingham was the first stage of serious internet development by Trinity Mirror, that is developing now into title-specific sites…it's part of the brand strategy to put the Birmingham Mail title in front of people whether it's online or in print," Mail editor Steve Dyson told Journalism.co.uk.

(Read Steve Dyson's Q&A with Journalism.co.uk )

The branded site has launched with a number of new elements. Seven new blogs, to be written by reporters and prominent members of the local community, have been added to the revamped site to augment the five that previously existed.

"We are looking much more at a wider package of content on the new site, we're looking beyond just uploads from the newspaper to make it an extra edition that doesn't have the boundaries of the paper, so we have added picture galleries, video and in time audio content," Ross Hawkes, senior multimedia editor for Trinity Mirror's Midlands, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We are also featuring highly our user-generated content, which is where things like our forums and blog contributions come in."

In addition to Hawkes, the online editor overseeing development of the new site, the Mail has internally appointed two new multimedia editors to manage sport, news and feature content across the site.

"We have really widened the scope of the site with things like tagging…we have also added things like shopping and more lifestyle content to broaden our user base. That's what's key to us - to really strengthen what we have already got," Hawkes added.

Five reporters are expected to be fully trained in video by the middle of the year, Dyson added, to work with the paper's existing video journalist so that two reporters will file daily video stories to the web, with the flexibility of having up to six working on video if necessary.

The Mail is also looking to develop a series of local community sites , along similar lines to those which have been established at the Teesside Gazette, another Trinity paper.