Sportsman
A 2006 article noted: "The Sportsman, Britain's first new national daily newspaper in 20 years, is betting that a gambling boom fueled by the Internet and televised soccer matches will help it overcome the industry's lackluster advertising growth.
"``The market has undergone a massive shift in the past five years, said Max Aitken, the newspaper's managing director and a great-grandson of Lord Beaverbrook, the legendary press baron. ``The U.K. betting market in the past 10 years has grown from 5 billion pounds ($8.78 billion) to 40 billion pounds.
"The Sportsman, which publishes its first issue today, aims at a new generation of gamblers attracted to Internet poker and the bevy of weekly soccer games now available on pay TV services such as British Sky Broadcasting Plc. The new London-based paper is taking on Trinity Mirror Plc's Racing Post while billing itself as looking at a broader range of sports than ``The Horse's Mouth, as the Trinity title calls itself...
"The closely held Sportsman has a startup investment of 12 million pounds from a group that includes Ben and Zac Goldsmith, sons of the late financier James Goldsmith. The paper has a staff of 120, and aims to break even operationally by the end of 2006, Pownall said..." [1]
"June 2005: Sports Betting Media created by Jeremy Deedes, a former managing director of the Telegraph Group, Charlie Methven, a former Telegraph journalist, and Max Aitken, the great-grandson of Lord Beaverbrook, former Daily Express proprietor.
"February 2006: A third round of fundraising raises £8m, including a £5m loan by Intuition Gaming, part of Intuition Capital, a private equity firm." [2]
"The investors are a motley crew and include the former Telegraph Newspapers chief executive, Jeremy Deedes, who is chairman of SBM; Max Aitken, the 28-year-old great grandson of Lord Beaverbrook, creator of the Express newspaper group, and the Sportsman's managing director; Ben and Zac Goldsmith, sons of the late Sir James Goldsmith, the controversial financier; a syndicate led by Ben Arbib, son of the city financier Sir Martyn Arbib; James Osbourne, managing director of Aspinall’s and property tycoon Martin Myers." [3]
