Regional dailies suffer accelerating sales falls as readers move online
 The six-monthly ABC audit for newsprint sales of local and regional newspapers has become meaningless. Nearly 100 weeklies (71 owned by Johnston Press; 28 owned by Local World) have pulled out of the audit altogether. Some that have stayed in have chosen to be audited annually. So the release of the figures yesterday, showing sales for titles during the final six months of 2013, present only a partial picture, at best, of the industry's continuing circulation tribulations. The statistics for regional dailies reveal an accelerating decline, running at almost 15% year-on-year. Some titles suffered very steep falls indeed. For example, the Blackburn-based Lancashire Telegraph recorded a 33.9% fall to a six-month average of 13,280 (compared to 20,076 in the same period of 2012). The other big fallers were the South Wales Argus and Bolton News, both down by 32.2%; Sheffield Star, -23.3%; Oxford Mail, -22.7%; and the Bournemouth-based Daily Echo and Brighton Argus, both showing 21.1% falls. The Doncaster Star suffered a 31.8% decrease, but it sells barely more than 1,000 copies a day. Among those that did best, keeping their print declines down to 5% or less, were in Scotland and Northern Ireland: the Dundee Courier and the Dundee Evening Telegraph; the Aberdeen Press & Journal; and the Belfast Telegraph. One oddity is that no 2012 comparison is given for The Scotsman, which sold an average of 29,452 copies in the second half of 2013. But ABC does have a record of the 2012 equivalent: it was 33,795. So the year-on-year fall was 12.85%. There were, of course, no risers among the 82 daily titles. But a handful of weeklies did buck the downward trend. The Annandale Herald boosted its sale by a terrific 31.4%, up from 2,710 a week to 3,560. There were more modest increases for two other Scottish titles: the Irvine Times, 3.1% and the Border Telegraph in Galashiels, 2%. In England, the Isle of Thanet Gazette rose by 5.8% while the Burnham & Highbridge Weekly News showed a 1.4% rise and the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide was up 0.9%. The Scunthorpe Telegraph, which moved from daily to weekly publication in August 2011, showed a rise of 0.7%. The rest of the 270 weeklies in the latest audit list all lost sales, with some suffering high double-digit declines, notably the Hereford Times, Crosby Herald, Cumbernauld News, Gwent Gazette, Brentwood Gazette, Burnley Express, Boston Target, Bucks Free Press, Bury Times, and the Birmingham Post. Every publisher and editor will point to the fact that their websites are picking up many more uniques than the loss in print sales. The figures for the regional groups' online performance suggest they are right. Newsquest was top of the digital league with 731,495 average daily browsers across the final six months of 2013, up 40.6% year-on-year. Johnston Press was second with 716,555 (up 29%), Trinity Mirror was third with 659,518 (up 23.3%), and Local World fourth with 622,201 (up 67.3%). The stand-out online stat belonged to the Kent Messenger group - up 96.4% to 49,015 browsers a day. theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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