AlLan Rennie, editor-in-chief of Trinity Mirror's merged Media Scotland operation, has pledged to confront the new media "T-Rexes in the room" while preserving the "history and heritage" of the Mirror Group and S&UN titles.
Rennie – whose appointment by Trinity's managing director Mark Hollinshead was announced last Tuesday – declined to give detailed plans for the group, which includes the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, until his introductory tour of the group's local newspaper offices is concluded.
He said: "I am trying to speak to all of the staff, and next week I'm going to be doing the grand tour of the 17 S&UN titles. It's a big empire, there's a lot of history and heritage and the first thing I have to make sure is that we hang on to that."
Rennie, a former development director for the Trinity Mirror national titles, is responsible for all newspapers and websites in the Scottish group. He said the group had to hone its response to the rapidly-changing media landscape, where print is under increasing threat from innovations such as mobile media, news aggregating websites, and IPTV (computer-based TV).
He said: "We really need businesses of scale to survive and prosper. It's not just about competing against traditional media, it's about competing against the elephants in the room – rather, the T-Rexes in the room – like Google and Facebook."
"The media landscape is going to change dramatically, people are going to progress to IP and local TV. We feel that we have a really strong base in some fantastic brands and some great journalism, and we want to extend them into other media."
Media Scotland consists of 300 journalists at the two national newspapers and 20 local titles including the Ayrshire Post, Stirling Observer and West Lothian Courier. It also includes the Business Insider magazine, an events business and 36 websites.
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