Media: Forum - Will new Daily Sport appeal?(Sport Media Group)

Can the Sport be revamped for mainstream advertisers? By Alasdair Reid.

When the porn baron David Sullivan launched Sunday Sport back in 1986, it instantly acquired a cheeky chappie notoriety that verged on the fashionable - and its daily stablemate duly arrived in 1991. The 90s, though, were not kind to the titles, which became tired, lost their ability to amuse and began veering towards the more louche end of the glamour photography market.

With the internet eating steadily into its audience, and with its client base dominated by sex industry ads, you could have been forgiven for predicting that the Sport titles were heading for obscurity.

But last week, Sport Media Group came out fighting. In April, the Daily Sport franchise is to be revamped to create the UK's first 'newszine' - a term invented by the company to convey a daily mixture of news and magazine content - aimed at 18- to 45-year-old men.

It will take its inspiration from the likes of Nuts and Zoo - and, indeed, its lads' mag aspirations are underlined by the fact that the new editor-in-chief will be Barry McIlheney, who masterminded the launch of Zoo; and its new editorial director is James Brown, the Loaded founder and godfather of the whole lads' mag genre.

It's an impressive line-up. But attracting a more mainstream audience won't be easy. And even if that's achieved, it will surely be hard to convince mainstream advertisers (many of which will strongly associate the Daily Sport brand with sleazy values) to come on board. It can't work, can it?

Why ever not, Andrew Fickling, the chief executive of Sport Media Group, responds: 'We had a steep decline in readership that coincided with our content becoming more salacious. We were selling 170,000 two years ago Now the figure is 100,000. We took the view that if we changed the editorial tone, then it was legitimate to believe we could attract back those lapsed readers. Girls and glamour will always be a big part of what we're about, but the changes in tone will make the Daily Sport less one-dimensional. We are moving the adult advertising to beyond the centrefold - which will make us the same sort of proposition as Nuts or Zoo or the Daily Star, all of which have adult advertising. There is an enormous scope for advertisers who want to target a hard-to-reach male audience.'