Press Gazette relaunches, still excludes trade press

So, Press Gazette relaunched last week. I actually saw the website in the first few hours, thanks to Martin Stabe’s tweet, but I’ve been far too busy to write about it.

My first impression was generally positive. I liked the “classic yet somehow modern” new logo and the newsy feel of the site. The few technical glitches in the site that I noticed in the first 24 hours seem to have been largely ironed out by now. And it’s generally clean, clear and easy to navigate around.

There are some major negatives, though. The lack of RSS feeds for the news is the obvious one. Most of the sites I follow regularly, I follow through RSS. Other news sites I have to remember to visit, and I suspect I’ll only be visiting the Press Gazette site when a journo-blogger I follow links to it.

But what really galls me is, try as I might, I couldn’t find a single reference to trade media in any of the sections.

If your stated aim is to broaden the appeal of the title to all journalists (the mag’s new strap is “for all journalists”), completely excluding the area that the few hundred journalists in this building earn their crust in seems a rather dumb move. And RBI is far from the only large publisher churning out business to business publications and websites. A whole, and not insignificant part of the market, ignored. A whole possible subscriber base, forgotten.

While I’m sure that Press Gazette runs stories on trade media, managing not to have a single story on this area on the site at the time of a major relaunch hardly endears the struggling title to us trade hacks.

*For all journalists. Apart from you dumb bastards in the trade press. Obviously. *