A former regional editor turned media commentator has predicted that most UK regional dailies will go weekly within the next ten years.
Steve Dyson says that by 2023 there will be “few, if any” daily regional and local newspapers left in the country.
The former Birmingham Mail and Teesside Gazette editor also predicts that the current ‘big four’ regional publishers will become a ‘big two,’ with shared online platforms.
His comments appear in the latest edition of the business magazine In Publishing.
Steve, who also reviews local and regional newspapers for HTFP in his fortnightly blog, says more than 30 regional dailies – those selling under 20,000 – will go weekly in the next five years.
Any dailies that remain will be concentrated in urban areas such as the Black Country, Merseyside, Tyneside and North-East Scotland.
Wrote Steve: “It’s not a hard scenario to predict: 13 regional newspapers have converted from daily to weekly publication in the last six years, most changing in the last two years.
“Of the 78 dailies currently remaining, more than 30 sell less than 20,000 a day and will go weekly – or close – in the next five years; a similar number – perhaps more – will convert by 2023.
“The industry will mainly consist of two types of weekly publisher: regional ‘giants’ with shared online platforms; and local start-ups and buy-outs with hyperlocal blogging websites.
“The likes of Newsquest, Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror and Local World will have changed out of all recognition, and will halve in number. The two that remain, along with the larger family firms, will publish fat, cat-killing weeklies covering cosmopolitan cities, large towns and urban counties where there are still enough readers and advertisers wanting regular and unique local insight in print.”
Steve predicts that most newspaper content will be analysis, timeless investigations and detailed comment, resulting in high quality, premium-priced papers.
Meanwhile breaking news, sport and videos will appear online, with the remaining’ big two’ operating a shared national platform along the lines of ‘upyourstreet.com’ with local pages automatically appearing based on a postcode app.
Areas not served by the ‘regional giants’ will see smaller local start-ups, some operated by former journalists who will be happy to break even rather than make large profits.
Most of the smaller print products that remain will be freesheets and will come out weekly, monthly or quarterly, predicts Steve.
In a separate piece, the magazine also sought the views of a panel of current daily and weekly editors about the future of the industry.
All agreed that although they would be fewer in number, there would still be printed newspapers around by 2030.
Bolton News editor-in-chief Ian Savage said: “Some dailies will probably go weekly or bi-weekly, with a strong digital package to supplement them.
“In other areas, it may be that the ‘newspaper’ brand is retained as a very strong digital offering which, again, can be seen as positive – as long as local journalists are on the ground getting the stories people wish to read. Huge differences, influenced by changes in society, readership and the public.”
Belfast Telegraph edtior Mike Gilson added: “Some do not deserve to be around now but others will survive. There are some cracking weeklies in the right rural markets which, if they keep to the old stuff – planning, courts, people and places – will hang around.
“We have to get used to doing stuff differently: in-depth, beautiful narratives, exclusives, investigations. They will be higher priced and less frequent but the quid pro quo will be increased quality… think lots of mini Economists, only with panache and vitality.”
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Most regional dailies will become bi-weekly or even weekly digests that simply regurgitate a round-up of news from their websites.
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…and the sooner the big publishers wake up and acknowledge that print media won’t make it beyond 2030, the better.
One of the biggest problems facing newspaper groups right now is that the current decision-makers are hanging on to pensions and retirement plans that cash in before digital completely takes over. So why would they bother hastening the demise of something they understand over something they don’t?
Too many newspaper boardrooms are filled with docile fifty-somethings who simply will not step aside and let the younger talent set the pace and the agenda for the future.
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Hmm… so we’re going to see “analysis, timeless investigations and detailed comment, resulting in high quality, premium-priced papers”.
How will citizen generated content achieve that?
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“Steve predicts that most newspaper content will be analysis, timeless investigations and detailed comment, resulting in high quality, premium-priced papers..”
I’d love to know how regional newspapers will achieve that with current management mindsets. Comment and analysis does not come cheap. I did it for many years for a large city daily, and to have an authoritative voice you need to have spent a long time in the job honing your skills and seeing life as it’s lived by the readers.
When I left said large city daily, the staff car park was full of battered old vehicles, many of the staff were struggling to get onto the property ladder and those in a relationship surely knew that at some time they would have to make a choice between having a family and continuing in journalism. How many of them will want to stick around long enough to acquire the weight of experience needed to produce that high-quality analysis and comment?
I had a wonderful 30 years in regional newspaper journalism…problem is I was in it for 35 years. The last five years were not so great as management strove to return us to a digital version of the sweat shops we thought our profession had long ago left behind.
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A stop must be put to these sinister developments before the local newspaper industry has blood on its hands.
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Most of the big regional dailies have been run down to a shadow of their former selves and sad to say, will not be particularly missed by readers.
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Just a couple of points from Steve’s crystal ball gazing.
I think his timescale is way off.
The rate which, what we used to call ‘the newspaper business’ is changing is accelerating. For 10 years read nearer five.
If the ‘big’ (and getting smaller) four become two it will be preceded by a period of cuts and culling which will make past and current ‘restructuring’ seem reasonable as companies position themselves to be the eaten or the eater.
And how will having the majority of surviving local and regional outlets in the hands of just two companies serve plurality in the media?
Start-ups? Hmmm, let’s see how the ‘big two’ will deal with its ex-staff doing well in their own back yard?
Mike is right when he says stuff must be done differently – but isn’t that what we did in the ‘good old days’?
Ian is right to highlight the changes in society – which means the readers (remember them?).
And should we all be very afraid that a term for taking a picture of yourself beats one for moving your bottom in a sexy way as 2013 ‘Word of the Year’?
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Or with any luck the big corporates will all have given it up as a bad job and leave it to small local operations that can survive on a fair profit margin without owing stupid amounts of money to the banks.
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2023 ! 10 yrs for all regional dailies to become weekly or bi-weekly is too long, it will be more like 5. Just look at the pace a change from 2007/8 to now and it is not slowing.
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Some of us saw the writing on the wall for regional dailies at the end of the last century. Nostradamus Mr Dyson is not.
Their days were numbered even then because readers were interested in what was happening in their immediate neighbourhood, their country and the world.
Most of them had little interest in what was happening in towns 40 or 50 miles away. Some hubristic editors responded by trying to turn their publications into mini-nationals, appointing health editors, education editors, political editors and the like – with predictably catastrophic results.
Their newspapers came to be regarded as inferior to nationals and no longer truly local, so sales plummeted. The Brighton Argus is a classic example.
I even tried to convince my then JP bosses of the obvious. They knew best, of course, and carried on with their spending spree…
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I think Steve’s analysis is way too broad brush. Yes, some dailies will go weekly, but they won’t necessarily be the smallest ones or the ones that lie outside big urban conurbations. Remember, when Northcliffe took four of its titles weekly in 2011, the two smallest-selling daily titles in the group were not among them. By contrast Trinity Mirror took the Liverpool Post weekly even though it circulates in England’s fourth-biggest city.
For what it’s worth I think the regional titles that will survive as dailies will be the ones that serve the most distinctive and, for want of a better word, idiosyncratic regions. So for instance the East Anglian Daily Press will survive because Norfolk is such a very different sort of place to the rest of the UK, and the EDP reflects that. The Western Morning News and the CN Group titles in Cumbria fall into the same sort of category. I would expect all of these papers, along with the big city dailies to which Steve alludes, to still be around in 2023.
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Ahem… a slight correction Old Regional Press Hand, I think you mean Eastern Daily Press (EDP) not to be confused with the East Anglian Daily Times, but I agree with the substance of your comments. Long live the EDP!
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I doubt there will be any nationals left by 2023 let alone regional dailies. What a ridiculous article.
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Ah, let’s not bother looking ahead at all, shall we, Herbert!
Seriously, thanks to all for the comments on this crystal ball-gazing.
It is, of course, just that: I was asked to think ahead ten years in 500 words.
The reality may be very different (or, as some of the above comments suggest, ‘fewer, if any’ dailies may be the case much sooner…
Let’s hope something else we don’t know about come in and retains regional journalism is a sustainable way.
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Not sure that “cat-killing weeklies” are going to prove too popular.
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Predicting stuff 10 years out is always tough – who would have predicted where we are now in 2003? I agree with a lot of what Steve says, although I think there will be more dailies than he thinks there will be, but they will be free and supported by some sort of tablet/e-edition thing for people who prefer to get it that way.
I don’t think ‘cat killer’ weeklies or bi-weeklies will work in big towns and cities, as there isn’t the sense of community in those places for such things to work. Even in places like Halifax, where you would assume there is a strong local community, the circulation figures of the now-weekly Courier suggest it isn’t a model which is guaranteed to work.
The biggest single challenge is making money out of digital, or rather enough money to sustain local journalism. That will become more affordable when the legacy costs of print are no longer an issue – eg print presses, newsprint – but it is still a big challenge. We can’t allow ourselves to be nostalgic about print if the audience clearly wants news delivered another way.
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Surely key issue is firms like JP and Newsquest try to run web and papers with inadequate staff levels. So both are shoddy products.
Quality costs. Rubbish comes cheap. Fact of life.
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Hello wifeof. I don’t think you’re right that cheap = rubbish. My local daily newspaper is a Newsquest title. I know many of the people there and they have fewer people there than at any point in their history, but the paper is far from rubbish. Based on the number of staff they have, the paper should be rubbish, but they are talented, creative people who go above and beyond every day because they care about their paper (and website) in spite of the cuts.
So you saying that cheap = rubbish isn’t a criticism of management, it’s actually a slur against the many people working incredibly long hours due to their professional pride.
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