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17 July 2005
Daily Tabloid For Gamblers On The
Cards
With
the country in the grip of a gambling boom, the media
slapped a substantial pile of chips on the table last
week.
Jeremy Deedes, the former
Telegraph
Group chief
executive, is fronting a plan to launch a 128-page daily
tabloid for gamblers next spring. If £12 million
venture capital can be raised, The Sportsman should become
the biggest national title to launch since The
Independent in
1986.
Dennis
Publishing has
announced it is going bigger on gambling
too. It is adding two new titles to Inside Edge, the
magazine for professional gamblers it launched 18 months
ago. From next month, Total Gambler will be given away free
with Dennis men's titles, including Maxim, Bizarre and Viz.
Its 28 pages will be aimed at gamblers of all levels. The
650,000 print run shows the scale of Dennis's
ambition.
This will be followed by
the UK's first dedicated magazine for poker enthusiasts, in
the autumn. It will be a stand-alone title with a print run
in the "tens of thousands."
Channel 4's Late Night
Poker series is returning in August with a new reality TV
flavour. On the renamed Late Night Poker Ace, players will
vie to become the UK's best amateur. Entrants will prove
their poker mettle by playing on the site to win through to
play on TV.
In reality, the media's
interest in gambling has not quite happened overnight. While
Inside Edge is 18 months old and Late Night Poker began in
1998, there have been a number of lower key arrivals
including Poker Zone and Poker Channel on Sky. Five also
covered the European Poker Tour last month.
In March, former foreign
secretary Robin Cook fronted a £210m bid for Trinity
Mirror's Racing Post, backed by investment bank Warburg
Pincus. The rejected bid valued the Post, which sells 80,000
a day, at more than a quarter of the £800m offer for
Trinity's three national newspapers by events organiser
Marcus Evans last month. The three papers' combined
circulation is over four million.
Jeremy Deedes says this
explosion in interest has been spawned by the internet
through betting exchanges like Betfair, which lets punters
become bookies by offering odds for different events online.
Online
casinos and
bookmakers are also doing good business.
"All this has meant that
the culture of betting has embraced a new generation of
young people who are interested in sport and what goes on in
the City," says Deedes.
Internet gaming companies
spend heavily on advertising to capture these young
gamblers. As Richard Downey, publisher of Dennis's gambling
titles, says: "The one thing that they all want is mass
market exposure for their brands. In terms of mainstream
media, there is not much for them to go into."
Charlie Methven, the
former Telegraph sports writer who is to edit The Sportsman,
says the media has only really caught on since the
unexpected success of Inside Edge. "From my days as a horse
racing journalist, I knew a lot of people who kept saying
they had lots of customers looking to read about betting.
Like everyone else, I was a bit slow. I should have been
doing this a year ago, but better late than never," he
says.
For The Sportsman, which
has received seed capital from the late Sir Jimmy
Goldsmith's sons Zac and Ben, the key question is whether it
can differentiate itself from the Racing Post and the
national newspapers.
Methven is bullish about
this. Unlike the Racing Post, which is mostly about horse
racing and greyhounds, the new title will concentrate on
whatever is the main betting story of the
day.
"I think there's room for
both of us. Horse racing is not the glamorous end of the
gambling industry, but it's still enormously popular," he
says.
As for the nationals, he
says: "There is a huge misconception that sports betting and
sports news are almost the same. They are totally different.
A sports newspaper reports on what's happened yesterday, but
a betting newspaper reports on what's happening
tomorrow. If the
nationals were to move into gambling, they would need a
whole new staff and a new dedicated supplement. They could,
but I don't think they will."
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