The recent local elections gave Newsquest’s daily titles a welcome sales boost, according to the regional newspaper publisher.

Many of the group’s titles saw healthy year-on-year increases, including the Daily Echo in Bournemouth which saw sales rise 17 per cent for its local election special.

Editor Neal Butterworth said his team were stunned at the increase.

He said: “Even given that the corresponding Friday sale figure in 2002 was low, based on the average last year we were still 13 per cent up.”

Meanwhile a 6am election special helped the Colchester-based Evening Gazette to a 6.6 per cent year-on-year sales boost.

The early edition featured ten on-day pages including nine dedicated to results and analysis from the area’s fourdistrict councils, and hit the streets as people were on their way to work instead of its usual midday slot.

An additional morning edition, again printed at 6am, also gave The Argus in Brighton a boost.

Editor Simon Bradshaw said: “Sadly, we were due to print at 5am but some of the results were so late we were late.

“That, combined with a major production difficulty on the update last edition, meant we didn’t do as well as we would have done.

“Even so, we sold an extra 2,000 copies – 3.5 per cent up year on year.”

The Evening Press in York printed its first edition an hour early with the news that the Liberal Democrats had seized control of the City of York Council ending more than 20 years of Labour rule.

All editions of the paper showed a rise in sale compared with the previous week, and in total put on more than 4,600 copies week-on-week.

And the Worcester Evening News’s coverage, complete with a front page devoted to the controversial Worcester City elections, helped the paper sell more than 1,000 extra copies for an average Friday, giving the paper its second best Friday of the year so far.

Editor Stewart Gilbert said: “The whole operation was very well received by the public… It was the only place you could get the complete run-down on the results.”

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