All bar two Trinity Mirror dailies saw a decline in print circulation over the last month, according to the latest ABC figures.
The Liverpool Echo and Sunday Mercury both experienced 0.1pc increases from November to December, but there was a drop in readership for its 13 other regional daily titles.
Year-on-year, all titles had declining circulations compared to December 2013 – with the Birmingham Mail (20.5pc) being the largest and the Manchester Evening News (4.5pc) being the lowest.
Year-on-year figures were unavailable for Liverpool’s Sunday Echo, which only launched in January 2014.
ABC publishes two sets of monthly data for Trinity Mirror’s principal titles, one showing print circulation and the other the combined print and digital figure.
The full month-on-month figures for the print editions are as follows:
| Title | Dec-14 | Nov-14 | % Change | |
| Birmingham Mail | 30,597 | 32,151 | -4.8% | |
| Cardiff – South Wales Echo | 20,433 | 20,529 | -0.5% | |
| Coventry Telegraph | 21,626 | 22,537 | -4.0% | |
| Daily Post (Wales) | 25,422 | 25,890 | -1.8% | |
| Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 14,801 | 14,941 | -0.9% | |
| Liverpool Echo | 61,313 | 61,255 | 0.1% | |
| Liverpool Sunday Echo | 20,736 | 21,498 | -3.5% | |
| Manchester Evening News | 66,193 | 68,435 | -3.3% | |
| Newcastle Chronicle | 34,954 | 36,493 | -4.2% | |
| Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Sunday Sun | 30,725 | 31,818 | -3.4% | |
| Sunday Mercury | 24,223 | 24,206 | 0.1% | |
| Teesside – The Gazette | 26,809 | 27,310 | -1.8% | |
| The Journal | 16,670 | 16,858 | -1.1% | |
| Wales – The Western Mail | 19,283 | 20,267 | -4.9% | |
| Wales on Sunday | 16,238 | 17,190 | -5.5% | |
The latest full year-on-year figures for print editions are as follows:
| Title | Dec-14 | Dec-13 | % Change |
| Birmingham Mail | 30,597 | 38,491 | -20.5% |
| Cardiff – South Wales Echo | 20,433 | 24,261 | -15.8% |
| Coventry Telegraph | 21,626 | 25,443 | -15.0% |
| Daily Post (Wales) | 25,422 | 27,126 | -6.3% |
| Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 14,801 | 16,848 | -12.1% |
| Liverpool Echo | 61,313 | 70,133 | -12.6% |
| Liverpool Sunday Echo | 20,736 | – | – |
| Manchester Evening News | 66,193 | 69,347 | -4.5% |
| Newcastle Chronicle | 34,954 | 39,463 | -11.4% |
| Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Sunday Sun | 30,725 | 34,103 | -9.9% |
| Sunday Mercury | 24,223 | 28,538 | -15.1% |
| Teesside – The Gazette | 26,809 | 30,222 | -11.3% |
| The Journal | 16,670 | 18,355 | -9.2% |
| Wales – The Western Mail | 19,283 | 22,854 | -15.6% |
| Wales on Sunday | 16,238 | 19,131 | -15.1% |
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Happy new year…..
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Least surprising news of the week, sad to say as the print cull continues. About 30,000 people buying Birmingham Mail in Britain’s second city is depressing.
2015 is going to be critical for local papers. Advertisers will only suffer circulation drops for so long before they want lower rates. And digital is a slow burner in hard money terms.
Good luck to anyone in the industry this year.
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The Birmingham Mail will soon be able to cut costs by producing the editions on a photocopier and hand delivering them to every reader with their name written in biro on the front. Sadly, the path was drawn out several years ago with some God-awful re-designs and a complete loss of focus on who the audience was.
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WillowtheWisp is spot on. The redesigns in both Birmingham and Coventry in 2006/7 were truly awful and led to sales figures falling off a cliff almost over night. Neither centres recovered from it.
The Birmingham Mail is weeks away from dipping below a circulation of 30,000 and the Coventry Telegraph is close to 20,000.
Pretty sure these significant milestones won’t go unnoticed. Although, if you take into account the thousands of bulk drops which count as sales (the free copies piled up at the airport, and the bundles given to estate agents are prime examples) then I suspect the writing is already on the wall.
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Astonishingly bad performance by Bhm Mail and crap year for Liverpool Echo after doing so well to stick around 70+ Still it is one of the last big boys left
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So sad to see what is happening to this wonderful industry
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We should be looking at the tablet by now.
Print is dying, but the tablet edition is the replacement. The dwell times average 45 mins per day and the ads are as effective as print, research by advertisers shows.
Of course, the tablet ed doesn’t need printing and distribution, so costs are cut there significantly and the reader experience is as engaging as print. The future is in the tablet.
Let’s wake up. It’s not all doom and gloom!
Je Suis Charlie
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JP papers suffered huge losses after company wasted about £700,000 on a Spanish redesign and never recovered sales. Anyone recall that?
Seems everyone went down same route. Genius.
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Just wait until Loco World have to release their figures.
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I think dailies are doomed because they are genuinely competing with social media and the net for breaking news.
Where print does have a future in my view is good quality weekly newspapers.
One thing people often don’t seem to grasp is that weekly and daily newspapers often have a different appeal. A daily is bought for up to the minute news (often this was why they ran several editions a day)
Weekly newspapers are bought because they make you feel part of your community. If a weekly paper was run with the right number of staff and ran good quality features and pieces on the town, I firmly believe they would have a future, much the same as well run and relevent magazines do.
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Looking at the Birmingham Mail’s latest figures, compared to Liverpool and Manchester, you have to wonder what they are doing that is so wrong?
They obviously aren’t engaging with the population of Birmingham and the latest “link baiting” just looks desperate…
http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/birmingham-city-46-pictures-blues-8420409
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Ex Trinity
I can’t speak for the MEN but the Echo enjoys a unique bond with the city that you probably wouldn’t find anywhere else. Liverpool has something of a siege mentality when it comes to other media and the Echo has tried to build a reputation as something of a a ‘defender of the faith’. I can’t think of any other city/newspaper relationship quite like that.
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John Wobble you are so right. A shame so many weeklies are under staffed and reliant on free copy to fill. It does show to buyers and advertisers. Excellent weeklies have a future. Mediocrities will die.
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Yes, you’d have to travel a long way from here to find any weekly newspaper you could brand as “excellent”….
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Yes future is tablet but these PLCs will never bridge the gap from behemoth to nimble outfit
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Funny about advertisers claiming 45 minute ‘dwell’ time..
Google’s own report says that more than 56 per cent of on line advertising is read by nobody at all.
Not a sausage.
Rugger ball.
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I love immediacy of digital but I won’t believe it has a future for weekly news until some company confirms it makes more money in total from digital than it does from print. Id guess it is on average 20 per cent digital 80 paper, but I admit that is a guess.
Now back to the ink…
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Birmingham Mail – Oh Dear
If that is a true like for like in terms of publishing days and includes bulks it is truly horrendous.
WillowtheWisp is correct the re designs in 2005 were a disaster, they did lose many copies overnight, never to return.
Comparing Brum to Manchester and Liverpool just not the same because of the socio ethnic changes that have impacted on Brum compared to the other two.
Will Brum be the first big city regional, ex evening, to go tri weekly ? or combine with the Mercury and go Sun Wed Fri ?
Perhaps Mr Dyson will put in an offer and rescue it by going back to a true evening with old school local editions.
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Regarding ads, it’s surely only a matter of time before people twig that ad-blocking software (mostly free) lets you filter out all the garbage so pages load faster and aren’t cluttered with junk you don’t want, whereupon that 56 per cent will become more like 80 per cent and even the best ad reps in the world won’t be able to flog it. At least in print the ads are physically there on the page. This isn’t an argument for retaining print, more that digital will end up being just as big a loss-maker in the long run now we’ve conveniently bred a generation of customers who won’t pay for anything and don’t care about news.
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I wonder how many journos or us ex journos actually read newspapers now?
I will pick up a weekly if I’m at someone’s house and they have one, but I don’t buy them any more because most of them aren’t very good, that’s no reflection on the staff still fighting the good fight, they’re just presided over by a management that simply no longer care.
A lot of reading is subliminal. A reader may peruse your paper and in the back of their mind they know it doesn’t seem as good as it used to be, and often they won’t even know why. It’s the UGC pictures, the simple lack of information or the wrong information, the apparent lack of local knowledge of the hard pressed staff, all of those things will put you off buying it.
Newspapers are the only industry I know that thinks it can reasonably expect a customer to pay more for a worsening product (while also giving it away free), and quite clearly – unsurprisingly – it’s not working.
The tragedy is that since the attempted switch over from print to digital, a lot of the people of quality have been culled, the remaining people are just trying to do right by their mates (I personally know of one multimedia editor who was a news editor and didn’t know what a hyperlink was), and others are just waiting for their payday so they can leave the sinking ship.
The whole industry is a terrible advert for capitalism. Beholding to shareholders, focussed on the short term, everyone out to survive as best they can without taking an interest in the big picture. Tragic.
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Tom Thumb’s spot on in every aspect. Particularly about the loss of quality people. When you look back at some of the bright stars who have moved on it really makes you wonder if the directors really care.
As one of those who remain, it’s so true. Some of us are trying to do right, just as some of us are secretly hoping for a payday with something else to go to or, like me, until it’s time to retire.
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If you want an indication why the Brum Mail is doing especially poorly read the reader comments at the end of this piece on their website….
http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/who-best-fa-cup-record-8255182
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