Busiest day for ‘buy newspaper’ alert system

A POSTCORD alerting system – whereby people are invited to buy a copy of the Edinburgh Evening News to find out more about a breaking story ‘down their street’ – had its busiest day on Friday.

It followed news that Edinburgh City Council is planning to close 22 schools in the city.

For the marketing department at Scotsman Publications, it meant 15 separate emails and 17 separate text messages going out to those on its database living in the affected areas of the city.

Some 30,000 people in the city have signed up to receive text messages alerting them to stories – in their postcode area – that they might be interested in reading about. The figure for email alerts is 35,000.

For alerts specifically about Hibernian football club, 8,000 have signed up, with the figure for rivals, Hearts, around 7,000.