All UK regional dailies saw circulation fall in the second half of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012 according to today’s ABC figures.
Some titles lost up to a third of their sales with the Lancashire Telegraph in Blackburn down 33.9pc.
The best performing title was the Irish News, whose average circulation was down just 1.7pc.
The full list of figures for UK regional dailies can be seen below. Trinity Mirror’s daily titles are excluded as they are now audited monthly. Its most recent figures can be seen here.
The list includes three daily titles, the Cambridge News, Burton Mail and Greenock Telegraph, whose sales are now audited annually rather than six-monthly.
In those cases, the sales figure given is an average of the whole of 2013, rather than the second half of the year as is the case with the other daily titles.
| England | Circulation | Change |
| Burton Mail | 10,603 | -4.8pc |
| Grimsby Telegraph | 20,896 | -6.5pc |
| Cambridge News | 17,793 | -6.6pc |
| Hull Daily Mail | 36,028 | -7.7pc |
| Western Morning News | 26,699 | -8.6pc |
| Eastern Daily Press | 44,957 | -8.7pc |
| North West Evening Mail | 11,191 | -8.9pc |
| Norwich Evening News | 11,945 | -10.3pc |
| Yorkshire Post | 32,156 | -10.5pc |
| The Sentinel | 39,137 | -10.7pc |
| The Press, York | 20,551 | -10.7pc |
| Carlisle News and Star East | 9,663 | -10.9pc |
| Derby Telegraph | 25,852 | -10.9pc |
| The Herald, Plymouth | 22,858 | -11.3pc |
| The Gazette, Blackpool | 15,650 | -11.5pc |
| Carlisle News and Star West | 3,725 | -12pc |
| Colchester Gazette | 12,362 | -12.1pc |
| Express & Star | 82,448 | -12.1pc |
| Wigan Evening Post | 5,018 | -12.3pc |
| Bradford Telegraph & Argus | 19,970 | -12.9pc |
| Northern Echo | 31,868 | -13.3pc |
| Shields Gazette | 10,960 | -13.3pc |
| Nottingham Post | 25,180 | -13.4pc |
| East Anglian Daily Times | 21,827 | -13.7pc |
| Western Daily Press | 21,783 | -13.8pc |
| Oldham Evening Chronicle | 10,347 | -13.9pc |
| Dorset Echo | 13,720 | -14pc |
| Leicester Mercury | 36,004 | -14.4pc |
| Gloucestershire Echo | 12,033 | -14.7pc |
| Sunderland Echo & Football Echo | 22,686 | -15pc |
| The News & Sports Mail, Portsmouth | 29,662 | -15.2pc |
| Shropshire Star | 39,168 | -15.7pc |
| The Post, Bristol | 27,117 | -15.8pc |
| Lancashire Evening Post | 15,659 | -16.3pc |
| Yorkshire Evening Post | 26,038 | -16.5pc |
| Southern Daily Echo | 23,278 | -17pc |
| Southend/Basildon Echo | 23,258 | -17.9pc |
| Ipswich Star | 13,727 | -18.2pc |
| Gloucester Citizen | 13,891 | -18.9pc |
| Hartlepool Mail | 9,218 | -19.7pc |
| Bournemouth Daily Echo | 19,022 | -21.1pc |
| The Argus, Brighton | 15,153 | -21.1pc |
| Swindon Advertiser | 12,691 | -21.9pc |
| Oxford Mail | 13,201 | -22.7pc |
| Sheffield Star & Green ‘Un | 24,544 | -23.3pc |
| Worcester News | 9,156 | -27.7pc |
| Doncaster Star | 1,162 | -31.8pc |
| Bolton News | 12,622 | -32.2pc |
| Lancashire Telegraph | 13,280 | -33.9pc |
| Wales | ||
| The Leader | 13,653 | -6.1pc |
| South Wales Evening Post | 30,582 | -12.3pc |
| South Wales Argus | 13,952 | -32.2pc |
| Scotland | ||
| The Scotsman | 29,452 | N/A |
| Aberdeen Press & Journal | 63,796 | -4.3pc |
| Greenock Telegraph | 12,215 | -4.4pc |
| Dundee Evening Telegraph | 20,421 | -4.8pc |
| Dundee Courier & Advertiser | 50,539 | -5.1pc |
| Paisley Daily Express | 6,767 | -6.4pc |
| The Herald | 38,939 | -9.8pc |
| Aberdeen Evening Express | 35,881 | -11.9pc |
| Edinburgh Evening News | 27,655 | -14pc |
| Glasgow Evening Times | 35,773 | -15.7pc |
| Northern Ireland | ||
| Irish News | 40,236 | -1.7pc |
| Belfast Telegraph | 47,528 | -4pc |
| News Letter | 19,550 | -9pc |
| Channel Islands | ||
| Jersey Evening Post | 16,736 | -5pc |
| Guernsey Press & Star | 13,939 | -5.8pc |
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Shocking figures. The inevitable consequence of the ‘digital first’ suicide mission led by the big groups.
HTFP carried a story yesterday that the cover price of the Scotsman has gone up from 85p to £1.30 in less than 15 months, a 53% increase.
The industry is getting the circulation figures it deserves.
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This list is not complete even allowing for Trinity Mirror – where are the local World ABCs?
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The mandatory resignations at the Northern Echo are obviously coming from the wrong end of the workforce.
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how is the Donny Star still a daily with those figures?
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How are the Sheffield Star and Green Un figures compiled,when the Green Un is now digital only and not printed
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Sheffield Star down 23%. Ouch!
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Desker: Donny Star is basically the Sheffield Star with a few change pages.
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Amazing isn’t it….the sales are in freefall and yet we are led to believe that all is wonderful in the world of the regional media because some more people are turning to getting their news free on websites!
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Oldjourno – try the Grimsby Telegraph, Cambridge News, Hull Daily Mail, Western Morning News, The Sentinel, Derby, Plymouth, Nottingham, etc. etc. !
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Truly shocked by all the figures, especially at The Scotsman – a paper for which I still have a great fondness. When I worked there in the mid 1990s, the circulation was 92,000 a day. One of the reasons my then editor was replaced, was because he had failed to get it back up to the magic 100,000. Now just 29,452. Very sad indeed and glad I am out of the industry.
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OMG, Express and Star down to 82,000 odd. I can remember when it was pushinng 300,000 not so many years back, or am I dreaming?
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Why is the Doncaster Star shown as a separate newspaper, when it is just an edition of the Sheffield Star with 80% of it Sheffield news? You don’t see sales figures for local editions of any other newspaper.
Even the masthead says “The Star” with “Doncaster edition” in the place of “City edition”.
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Is it safe to use the words “free fall” yet?
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Ed the duck, but that’s less than a cup of coffee you know!
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Shocking. Truly shocking. The thing is, working in the industry as I did up to 2010 from 1995, you could see how little the traditional newspaper people failed to recognise future problems. While the old editors knew their newspapers, they knew nothing at all about what awaited them in the online world. They had too much power and not enough knowledge. Admittedly, I knew nothing either, but then I was just a lowly sub. To use a crude analogy, who’s fault was it the Titanic hit the iceberg? Not the poor cabin boy, that’s for sure
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The figures for Newsquest are shocking.
The figures for Johnston Press continue to get worse.
The figures for Local World are much worse than the last set of results.
20 English titles have declines of more than 15%.
When are messrs Highfield, Montgomery and Davidson going to take some responsibility for this ? When are their so-called strategies going to be challenged ?
If this is the price of the dash for digital, then the future for the industry looks very bleak indeed.
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The King has got no clothes on.
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Sadly, I don’t think anybody at the top really cares. To them print is a platford for which the support is about to be kicked away completely.
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Yet another set of disastrous figures for Archant Norfolk and Suffolk dailes and weekly papers dropping to all time lows for these once credible titles.
With the Norwich DP down to a staggering 45,000 and the Norwich evening news down to less than 12,000,the ipswich daily hitting rock bottom at less than 22,000,the norfolk weeklies heading south at an alarming rate of knots and on the back of huge readership losses last year they must be in serious serious questions must be asked as to the future of these papers
Will anyone be accountable for these god awful performances or will they still bury their heads in the sand and keep racking the ad rates and cover prices up to offset the losses from an audience that is rapidly turning their backs on them in spades
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I just can’t believe the decline in Brighton.I worked at the Argus in the 80’s and we would fear for our jobs if the flagship paper sales fell below 95000!!
It must be time to turn off the lights…
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Amazing the Aberdeen paper sells almost as much as the Herald and Scotsman combined.
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Shocking and disastrous – an indictment of inadequate and profiteering management that failed (and still fails) to understand the changing industry it leads.
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And I can remember when the Yorkshire Evening Post was selling about 250,000 a night and the rival Evening News about 130,000.Where have all the readers gone ?
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As far back as the late 90s it was obvious to anyone in the regional newspaper industry that there were huge storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
Having largely squandered the dividend offered by the switch from hot metal to cold set and computerisation, most managements found it more convenient – and far easier – to bury their heads in their still healthy balance sheets.
Instead of fighting tooth, nail and internet for the dwindling small ad revenue, they preferred the option of dithering around the periphery with Fish4 and the like.
By the time the penny dropped it was far too late. The small ad revenue had migrated into other more nimble pockets, and the slow drip,drip of declining circulations was becoming more of a flood.
Worse still, the managements who were beginning to see the very real and present dangers of the internet, dithered disastrously.
Rather than hire good people who really understood the burgeoning web business and engage with the technology industry to produce a workable model properly to integrate print and web, they preferred to believe that somehow salvation would be gained to on the oft repeated mantra that “the future was web shaped”.
Make no mistake, finding a viable solution was never going to be easy, but the moment has passed, and now the attainment of that solution looks nigh on impossible.
With news readily available for free on the internet and facing a situation where it is impossible, with dwindling revenues and chronic levels of redundancy, ever to add a sufficient premium to the their printed products to justify the ever-rising cover prices, the regional press is trapped in a blind alley largely of its own making.
Subbing hubs, redundancies, technological systems that have arrived 10 years too late, may hold back the tide for a little longer, but the wasted years will finally have their revenge.
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Shocking Express & Star figures not helped when content is available for free on the web, often before in print.
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We have never had so many keen and intelligent young journalists while technically newspapers are better than ever before.
Yet the terrible irony is that the reading matter has never seemed so bloody boring and trivial.
It seems that the Internet has enlarged the perceptions of even the dullest clod-hopper.
In my local daily some scruffy looking columnist is writing about his crotch.
Who wants that when you have the whole world at your fingertips?
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@From a distant viewpoint
I believe the Wolverhampton Express & Star peaked at around 242,000 in the 1990’s
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Alf, you’re right, then one of your Rolls-Royce neighbours kicked the bucket and the rest is history.
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Has anyone noticed that the Lancashire Telegraph has the dubious distinction of having the worst circulation performance (-34%) with just about the lowest growth (1.1%) in web traffic. Takes some doing that. Newsquest must be very proud.
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Yes, shock, horror, end of the world as we know it, etc. But these figures merely confirm what we’ve known for ages (see comments above, all long familiar to HTFP readers). The issue is whether local news has enough cash-generating power left in it to sustain any of the current companies. I can remember, for example, when the Motor section (all revenue) of the Croydon Advertiser was at least three times the size of today’s entire paper – and never mind Jobs, Property and the national ads. I cannot see online producing enough money to fund careers and so on, so I think we’re probably ducks waiting for the hunters to start firing and we know what sort of ducks they are. If there is a viable solution, I’ve yet to hear it. Anyone?
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I agree with many of the observations made by ‘sutler’ but disagree with his/her assertion that, “…the wasted years will finally have their revenge.” The consequences of the wasted years are already biting hard and local news businesses have to change or they’ll die. For many, the necessary (and usually painful) changes are underway.
I don’t believe there is a diminished appetite for local news and information in this digital age. The market is still there but those in the market want news and information on their terms. Weekly newspapers will survive; dailies will not. As for the publishers, those that survive / succeed will be those that find cheaper ways of generating content, brilliant ways of making it available to people through the channels or devices of their choosing, and monetising the audience. Easy!
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When the death knell of the regional newspaper business is finally sounded, the early rush and insistence still today of putting free content on the web will go down in history as he biggest disaster since the fall of Singapore, or something.
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I went in to the local (big city) branch of WH Smith this week. In the 70s and 80s one had to push one’s way through the crowds milling around the magazines. This week there were no crowds. Seems that the great British public has lost the reading habit.
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Alf Tupper, the circulation of the Manchester Evening News in 1976 was 404,000. Now it can barely muster 70,000 readers
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Dick Minim and ill-informed (et al) – Anyone who knows this business knows it is beset with challenges from the economic downturn, big companies thinking the good times will return (and even some of us journalists did well in the good times too), over-leverage, migration of ad revenue to other media etc etc.
But the biggest challenge is cultural change, which caused circulations to fall long before all of the above. We do not live in communities that are bound by workplace, a sense of place in a village, estate, town, trade union, politics or sporting rivalries and where the local paper was king.
We live individual lives and our alliances have switched to family, lifestyle choices, posessions, property and wealth.
These are all fed by a new media that is transient, shallow and dressed up as being tuned to the individual but is actually as individual as a tin of baked beans.
I am not saying this is good or bad but it was all well prophecised (just read some of Ray Bradbury’s stuff of 40-50 years ago) but largely ignored by most politicians and all newspapers.
If papers, and now digital channels, have been hit by a perfect storm, cultural change is at the eye of that storm.
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To MC 48:
My local WH Smith is very quiet every day of the week now and only comes half alive on Saturday afternoons.
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The Doncaster Star is three to four pages of Doncaster news, the rest is Sheffield stuff.
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‘Confused’ is right to note that local newspaper circulations were falling long before the (most recent) economic downturn, over-leverage, migration of ad revenue to other media, etc, and I agree that cultural change is a huge factor. But is he/she suggesting that ‘local’ is somehow less important nowadays? If so, I can’t agree with that view.
People continue to live most of their lives in local communities. What happens at the local hospital matters. The state of local roads matters. The performance of the local football team matters. Activities in the town centre matter. After-school clubs matter. I could go on and on – you get the gist.
The appetite for local news and information is undiminished by cultural change. Evidence? Look no further than the soaring traffic figures reported by ABC for local news websites.
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Confused writes a lot of sense….charging for content.by however small an amount.has to be the way forward.
After all, would newspapers give advertising away for free,and don’t forget that the BBC charges for content..its called the license fee….
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I agree that charging for content is a way forward but the pre-requisites to it working are…
a. the audience sufficiently value the content
b. the content is unique to the publisher
b. it isn’t easily available for free elsewhere
The latter two points are major issues. I recall a study with tens of thousands of internet users that asked what they would do if the content they were enjoying on a local newspaper’s website wasn’t available for free. The overwhelming majority said they’d look for it elsewhere online (they were adamant they weren’t paying and they certainly weren’t going to pick up a copy of the printed newspaper). When asked what they would do if they couldn’t find the content elsewhere online, the majority then said they just do without. And this was before the growth of Twitter which makes it easier than ever to connect with local people who can offer an accurate update on the traffic jam / football score / police chase / whatever is of interest.
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I do love the HTFP comments section and its armchair experts, merely repeating the old adage ‘the internet killed the newspaper star’. I do love the line that newspapers should charge for their content online. Part of the problem with most newspapers is the crap they put in them isn’t worth the cover price, so why would it be worth buying online when far better entertainment can be found.
If newspapers and their content is so valuable why not back the horse completely, close the websites and see how the newspapers perform? Let’s see if that really does improve sales figures…
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i know the Norfolk and Suffolk papers well, their tactic of chasing the quick buck by filling the papers to bursting point with cheap ads in place of quality content and the suicidal cover price increases,make that ` sneaky` cover price etc, and its a recipe for readers to vote with their feet as is evidenced by the shocking copy sales published here.
I will bet there will be nothing in Archants papers about this,just the usual don`t mention the figures and hope no one notices mentality that`s prevalent throughout the business
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The comments to this set of ABC results reflect a lot of people angry and passionate about the regional press. The numbers are truly shocking and deserve some proper interrogation and accountability.
Contrast the lively debate here with the deafening silence of the industry leaders. What does David Montgomery think about these numbers ? And Paul Davidson and Ashley Highfield.
Newsquest’s Lancashire Evening Telegraph has lost 1 in 3 newspaper buyers in a year.
How bad does it have to get before those responsible at the top actually say something, let alone do something ?
The leadership of the regional press is currently abject. These ABC figures are shameful.
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Yes everyone’s an expert but It’s a pity the local media big wigs aren’t as passionate and as realistic about their papers as the people commenting on here,
if they addressed the real issues and made individuals accountable for these horrendous performances instead of making excuses and carrying on justifying their performances as being no worse than the next man and actually accept that they are desperately chasing an audience that’s evolved with the times and moved on then maybe they could adapt their products to something people actually want.
On line content is here to stay, quality independant local magazines have found a real market both in readership and commercial terms as they focus on their specific market sector and their standards of content and leave the scrabbling money chasing stack it high sell it cheap devaluing of their product to the paper boys.
Quality local radio is an instant provider of news as it happens not a peddler of yesterday’s stories and is the go to medium for instant info either broadcast or via streaming on the go, gone are the days of people buying a paper for the days news,there are others doing it better and more progressively and for free.
These woeful figures reiterate that it’s time to wake up and take stock before their whole house of cards comes tumbling down and starts impacting even more on the finaces of the regionals and affecting jobs in the industry big time
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Note the fall in circulation on the Newsquest titles that put up their cover prices by upwards of 40 pc.
Doubt the geniuses who thought this one up are now cheering the fact they have lost almost 30 pc circulation in some cases and failed to make a single penny more.
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To the ‘we should charge for local content online’ brigade, give me some feedback on this:
Down the road from me, Local World publishes the Lincolnshire Echo. It turned weekly about two-and-a-half years ago when it was selling around 16,500 copies a day. It now sells 19,687 a week, according to recent figures (and we all know that’s lower when you chuck out the souvenir specials).
From what I understand, on top the reduction in print and distribution costs, staff reductions have realistically accounted for its survival. It is now, by all accounts, doing well commercially in print (by no means back to anywhere near the ‘glory days’) but growing its digital side of the business rapidly too.
Looking at the figures, it’s average monthly unique visitors must be around the 330,000 mark now and all accessing its FREE content.
Now, over the road is The Lincolnite, a graduate start-up now in its fourth year of operation. It has no printed product and focuses primarily on the city. Its founders, who also have other digital jobs, do much of the work themselves while guiding a small number of part-time trainee journalists from the university next door. They also make the most of various available free resources.
However, it boasts a growing unique monthly readership of 170,000 and, given its low-cost business model, is now self-sufficient from its various advertising revenues. Its content is also FREE.
It also has 12,000 Twitter followers, compared with the Echo’s 10,000, and 24,000 Facebook likes, compared with the Echo’s 6,500.
Given that the majority of the Echo’s revenue in both print and digital comes from the wider city area, what do you think would happen if they started charging for it? Their online audience would go elsewhere and their digital revenue would fall off a cliff.
This situation is not unique to Lincoln, so local papers cannot charge for content as someone else will do it for free instead. Local news simply does not have the appeal to make it pay, regardless of how investigative or original it is.
Within reason, almost anyone can attend a court’s public gallery, put in an FOI with a local authority or get near enough to a crash scene armed with a smartphone which means almost anyone can create a website or blog about it. This doesn’t mean anyone can be a journalist, far from it, but the basic facts are all people really seem to care about at a local level. If they are interested in more than that, there are certainly not enough of them to make it worth charging for.
The sad truth is that Monty’s ‘vision’ of a newsroom without editors, subs or photographers is the only way in which local papers will be able to compete in the future and the online model will always have to remain free.
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