FREE LONDON business daily City AM is to launch an Edinburgh edition later this year in the first stage of a roll-out to eight cities around the UK.

The tabloid title, which is handed out in London's financial Square Mile and has been an unexpected hit since it launched nearly two years ago, aims to distribute between 10,000 and 15,000 copies in the Scottish capital.

Scots-born managing director Lawson Muncaster said: "Edinburgh excites me. With local copy and local advertising, we can do something nice there."

The company plans to hire about four staff for a new Scottish office, comprising two journalists and two advertising sales executives, which would mean that the majority of content would come from its sister London paper.

Asked why City AM was prioritising Edinburgh, Muncaster said: "Outside of London, the Edinburgh market probably has the most companies associated with business and finance in the country. But that's not to say we are not looking at Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds."

Unlike the main edition, City AM's Edinburgh edition will mostly be delivered to offices and only handed out in a few key transport "hotspots".

This is due to the fact that business is not concentrated in a single area in the city in the way that it is in London.

Muncaster added that his company was using a totally different model to business am, the paid-for title that launched at the turn of the decade but folded several years later.

He said: "Business am tried to test a business idea in Scotland for the rest of the UK and one critical factor it hadn't looked at was the fact that the FT only sold a few thousand copies in Scotland.

"Although the product was very good, I thought its distribution mechanism with the Royal Mail was very poor."

City AM now distributes 97,000 copies in London a day, compared to 59,000 at its September 2005 launch.