A senior executive of the company which predicted that half of the UK’s regional and local newspapers would close by 2013 today admitted they got it wrong.

Two years ago, Clare Enders of Enders Analysis shocked the industry by predicting that 650 of the country’s 1,300 local and regional titles would close within five years.

In fact most of the 60-odd titles that have closed have been free weeklies in areas with more than one weekly title, while there have been more newspapers launched in the past year than have closed.

Today Douglas McCabe, who works alongside Ms Enders as a media analyst, admitted the infamous prediction had been “unnecessarily pessimistic.”

He said: “You aren’t seeing closures on anything like that scale, and we haven’t seen the all-important dailies closing.

“It’s always a massive risk when you talk about the number of closures. When you make predictions on those kinds of numbers you always get yourself into deep hot water.

“What Clare has always argued is that the structural changes in the newspaper industry were being under-rated by some people in the industry.”

Mr McCabe was speaking at the annual ‘2020 Vision’ breakfast session on the closing day of the Society of Editors conference, which looks ahead to the likely media landscape in 2020.