A regional daily which made cuts to its features and photographic departments during the first half of 2016 has topped the circulation tables for the same period.
Today’s six-monthly ABC figures revealed all regional daily newspapers in the United Kingdom experienced a decline in circulation between January and June of 2016, when compared to the first half of 2015.
However, the Leicester Mercury, which made a number of photographers and features staff redundant earlier this year, saw the least decline in print, with a current circulation of 29,317 representing a 3.7pc year-on-year fall.
Mercury editor Kevin Booth also left Trinity Mirror in April, and has since been replaced by George Oliver.
The period also saw the Mercury release several special editions, including the Sunday issue pictured above, to coincide with local football club Leicester City’s surprise Premier League success.
The next three paid-for dailies in the table are all based away from the British mainland – the Irish News (-4.6pc), Guernsey Press & Star (-4.7pc) and Belfast Telegraph -5pc).
Wolverhampton’s Express & Star has the highest circulation of any newspaper for which figures were reported, at 59,267.
The full list of regional dailies, in order of year-on-year percentage change, is as follows:
| Title | Total | Y-o-y pc |
| Leicester Mercury | 29,317 | -3.7 |
| Irish News | 35,921 | -4.6 |
| Guernsey Press & Star | 12,580 | -4.7 |
| Belfast Telegraph | 41,912 | -5 |
| Yorkshire Post | 26,491 | -5.1 |
| South Wales Argus | 11,344 | -6.3 |
| Belfast News Letter | 16,396 | -6.4 |
| Aberdeen – Press & Journal | 54,270 | -7.2 |
| Paisley Daily Express | 4,986 | -7.4 |
| Jersey Evening Post | 13,791 | -8.1 |
| Eastern Daily Press | 36,605 | -8.1 |
| Norwich Evening News | 9,680 | -8.1 |
| Derby Telegraph | 20,090 | -8.2 |
| Oxford Mail | 10,777 | -8.4 |
| Dundee Courier | 41,243 | -8.5 |
| Worcester News | 7,422 | -8.5 |
| Ipswich Star | 11,108 | -8.8 |
| The Bolton News | 10,172 | -8.8 |
| Swindon Advertiser | 10,056 | -9 |
| Northern Echo | 25,290 | -9.1 |
| Carlisle News and Star East | 7,306 | -9.2 |
| Hull Daily Mail | 28,686 | -9.2 |
| East Anglian Daily Times | 17,028 | -9.4 |
| Dundee Evening Telegraph | 16,354 | -9.5 |
| Nottingham Post | 18,610 | -9.6 |
| Plymouth Herald | 18,191 | -9.7 |
| Dorset Echo | 10,944 | -9.8 |
| Yorkshire Evening Post | 18,093 | -10 |
| The Argus, Brighton | 11,424 | -10.3 |
| Colchester Daily Gazette | 9,866 | -10.8 |
| Essex Echo | 18,996 | -11 |
| The Press, York | 15,428 | -11 |
| North West Evening Mail | 8,458 | -11.1 |
| Aberdeen Evening Express | 27,441 | -11.3 |
| Lancashire Telegraph | 11,807 | -11.3 |
| Lancashire Evening Post | 11,632 | -11.4 |
| Bradford Telegraph & Argus | 14,813 | -11.5 |
| The Herald | 30,402 | -11.6 |
| Teesside Gazette | 22,513 | -11.7 |
| Express & Star, Wolverhampton | 59,267 | -11.9 |
| Shropshire Star | 28,441 | -12.1 |
| Southern Daily Echo | 17,521 | -13.3 |
| South Wales Evening Post | 22,572 | -13.7 |
| The Sentinel, Stoke | 28,862 | -13.7 |
| Carlisle News and Star West | 2,789 | -14 |
| The Chronicle, Newcastle | 28,258 | -14 |
| Edinburgh Evening News | 20,235 | -14.1 |
| Manchester Evening News | 51,794 | -14.1 |
| Oldham Evening Chronicle | 7,434 | -14.2 |
| The News, Portsmouth | 20,818 | -14.2 |
| Glasgow Evening Times | 25,679 | -14.3 |
| The Scotsman | 20,304 | -14.6 |
| Bournemouth Echo | 13,987 | -14.7 |
| South Wales Echo | 16,241 | -15.2 |
| The Gazette, Blackpool | 10,332 | -15.4 |
| Sheffield Star | 17,159 | -15.5 |
| Bristol Post | 18,967 | -16.3 |
| Sunderland Echo | 14,038 | -16.9 |
| Liverpool Echo | 47,862 | -19.9 |
| Doncaster Star | 604 | -21.3 |
| Coventry Telegraph | 16,475 | -22.7 |
| Hartlepool Mail | 5,735 | -22.9 |
| Birmingham Mail | 21,086 | -23.8 |
| Shields Gazette | 6,152 | -24.8 |
| Wigan Evening Post | 2,822 | -30.1 |
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Once again I see that Johnston Press papers have excelled themselves when it comes to massive decreases in sales.
You reap what you sow in this life and no wonder the three JP North East papers (Hartlepool, Sunderland and South Shields) are all in the bottom ten. Turn out a terrible product and nobody will buy it.
The Hartlepool Mail is the worst of the three but there’s not much in it. Add to that some of the worst web sites in the industry and it’s no wonder shares have taken another tumble and are now at 9p and set to drop further.
Made my day to be honest.
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The rapid decline of readers fleeing the EDP and Norwich evening news continues
All time low sales figures and yet another sales drop,this time a staggering 8.1 loss on each titles already eroded copy sales figures must surely sound alarm bells across the company. For its once flagship title to be down to 36,000 copy same mist herald serious questions about its viability and future.
No business can suffer this level of loss without drastic action being taken.
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OMG!
Further proof if any be needed that pushing your cover prices up twice in less than a year cannot redress the huge copy sale losses which continue to be suffered by the eastern daily press and norwich evening paper.
If people aren’t buying at one price then the price increases twice in a short period of time only a fool would think they’ll pay more for less.
The only hope for these two papers must be going free to grow an audience or closing
Seriously I’m stunned at just how far, particularly the EDP has fallen in such short period of time but considering the lack of investment and general dumbing down of the paper including content, lack of adverts and doing away with togs whilst other parts of the business get propped up we shouldn’t be surprised
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Pretty much terrible news all round. The Worcester News at 7,422 can barely be viable these days and as for the rest, they’re heading in the same direction. Still, I expect these ailing ‘products’ have record numbers of internet ‘hits’ (yes, some people are still referring to those without having a clue what ‘hits’ are), Facebook ‘likes’ and other meaningless drivel to show they have a fab future online.
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Yorkshire Post only sells 26,000 now?
Gulp.
That’s a bit pathetic.
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Maybe these declines would be far smaller if publishers hadn’t taken the lemming-esque decision, a decade or so ago, to start reproducing the vast majority of their content online, for free. Feel free to accuse me of failing to move with the times if you must, but… Craziest. Move. Ever.
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Will Hung. You nailed it. Spot on.
I was saying precisely that more than 15 years ago.
Imposters took over the newspaper industry. Foolish journalists more interested in paying the mortgage than doing the right thing, listened to them and followed. They’re reaping their rewards now with record redundancies and office closures.
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ex-JP sub, with reference to your comment about the “meaningless drivel” of hits and Facebook likes, I’m going to repeat a question I’ve asked on here before (and still hasn’t been answered):
Where do you think the future of local journalism lies when circulation drops to a point at which it is no longer commercially viable to print newspapers?
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Zenithar makes a fair point: at some point in the future, the only financially viable means of selling editorial content may be via the web. But the other commenters also have a fair point: the rush to digital was not about ‘selling’ content, it was about giving it away and hoping that somewhere down the line a profitable business model would emerge. It still hasn’t. Which makes it fair comment for the digital agnostics to ponder whether we would be in this situation had we not rushed to give our way product away in the first place. My guess is that the decline would have been somewhat slower, and embracing digital has meant that we hasten the day when digital is the ONLY way to sell what we once called a newspaper.
My old newspaper the Manchester Evening News has one of the most successful websites going, but if it was forced to depend on digital revenues alone to keep the business going, what proportion of those very able journalists could it afford to retain…a quarter…a tenth?
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10 JP titles in the bottom 20, all with a decline of 14% or more.
Just saying….
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Looking at JP’s share price of 8.5p at 4.30pm today means the whole company is worth £9m. What does surprise me is that JP is worth just £9m and they only recently purchased the i for £24m. Something is going wrong somewhere
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The other day we had the editor of the Norwich Evening News on here saying it would be impossible to consider closing a paper which sells 10,000, six days a week. Now we know it isn’t doing that. How much lower is too low? The same applies across the board.
I would add, I’ve no desire to see titles close. What I would like to see is an end to the constant erosion of quality but you can’t help but fear it’s now gone so far that we’re trapped in a vicious circle.
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On the face of it the Mercury has done well but surely you should be able to increase circulation when your Premier League team beats odds of 5,000-to-one to lift the title. We’re all domed.
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Doomed as well!
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Dave S. Johnston Press was described by a number of financial experts as a “zombie company” when the share price was about 140p. Yet Ashley Highfield once boasted of taking JP to a market capitalisation of £600m. Laughable.
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There’s only so long any business can sustain falling revenues and lack of real interest in the product before real action has to be taken, action which in my view can only mean serious and extensive investment in the EDP ( forget the evening daily, that I fear is a wholly lost cause ) but which I fear is far too late to redress the problems lumbering down the EDP and entire portfolio of Archant titles or, simply pulling the plug on those not making profit.
For a daily paper with a potential county wide reach of nigh on 900,000 people to be selling just 36,000 tells is all we need to know about how credible it is anymore.
I just wonder how much further this paper has to fall before something is done about it
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Always raise an eyebrow at any figures that are a 20/30/40 above 1000. If its 25,030 it will mean 24,XXX etc. 17,043 =16,XXX etc.
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Please stop this interweb killed the print star nonsense. The frequency of page impressions per user is shockingly low on regional newspapers – on average people are only reading a few stories per month, if that. Unique users is reach, what really counts is depth.
The real question is: when it can’t be given away free on readily accessible formats, why should we expect anyone to pay for the hard to get version?
Its the content quality and relevance that’s declined, about in line with the audience.
Simples
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Interesting that the MEN average daily paid-for sale is below 30,000 – thankfully they have all those pick copies bundled into their ABC figure to inflate it.
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Just checked Express & Star – actual daily sale under 50,000. Shows how misleading the topline ABC figures are; does that make the Press & Journal top dog?
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Is the Burton Mail still in existence? Can’t seat in the dailies list.
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see it!
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This is not just a crisis of sales or digital or dumbing down. It is a direct threat to local democracy.
If there are not going to be any “serious” local papers, where will we turn to ask questions of local authorities, see justice being done, and get involved with the community?
There is a socio-political issue here far greater than simple market economics.
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Accepting all the previous comments about the sales declines at individual newspapers and/or groups I find it absolutely shocking that my old title, the Birmingham Mail, has incredibly lost another quarter (24 per cent) of its circulation in just 12 months and now sells a miserly 21,000 copies – with a population of 1 million in the city alone! Forget all the hype and chest-thumping about digital growth – the bottom line, and revenue, is print sales.
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Sadly I am old enough to remember when he YEP sold over 250,000 copies a night printed in Leeds and Doncaster.
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The biggest problem with local press, in my view, is that most people under 60 are not particularly bothered about local news and events these days. The web has made the world smaller, and people are more interested in weird and different events that are happening on the other side of the planet than they are about a missing cat on the next street. The local press just cannot compete, whether they invest in a better quality product or marketing.
Companies are more likely to advertise with Facebook and Google than the local press due to being able to show highly targeted ads to their ideal audience and the local press just cannot do this.
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Looking at the incredible six month losses yet again particularly in my area of the eastern counties I fear for some of these titles, irrespective of how much or little is in the war chest it simply isn’t viable to continue publishing and racking up costs onto a market that’s gone.
Action needs taking,and pdq.
36,500 EDPs and 9,600 evening papers is rock bottom and beggars belief that the audience has gone in so short a time .
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How sad! Remember the days when the Manchester Evening News circulated in excess of 400,000 a day? Then it was a proud paper with a great reputation and a “Friend Dropping In”. Now a drop-out with continued stories about low life, crime and so-called celebrities. Yes, times have changed in the digital age but here we have a newspaper in total freefall, mismanaged by a publisher apparently preparing for its funeral in print. Present rate of decline it might last a couple of years if the staff are lucky.
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@southside johnnie
it will take more than another crafty price hike and a tired old cut out and collect voucher for photos offer to change things I’m afraid.It’s all just an effort to sling anything and everything into Q4 to damage limitate but as has been said its all a little too little, a little too late.
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And yet, Old Hack, the MEN now has the best regional news website in the country. Can’t really call that mismanagement, can you?
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Harry B: the pleasure you seem to indicate in the hard times faced by the title you once edited (and its sister titles) comes across as sour to me. It’s a shame to read such vindictiveness from someone who claims to love the trade. By all means continue to have your ‘told you so’ moment, but to say ‘Made my day’ reads so badly for you, in my honest opinion.
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