All five Johnston Press titles which made the switch from daily to weekly publication have seen dramatic increases in their sales figures.
The latest ABC figures show the Scarborough News posted the best circulation rise following the switch at 69pc, while the other four titles all had increases in sales of at least 39pc.
Johnston Press announced in April that five of its daily titles would go weekly in May as part of plans to relaunch all its newspapers by the end of the year.
The titles affected were the Scarborough title, the Halifax Courier, Northampton Chronicle and Echo, Peterborough Evening Telegraph and the Northants Evening Telegraph.
The latest figures showed all the titles had significant falls in their average sales before the relaunches but saw large increases in their average sale per edition during June – the first month of weekly publishing.
At the Scarborough News, sales were at 9,914 when it was a daily, then its figure recorded for June was 16,736 – an increase of 69pc.
The Halifax Courier saw its sales increase by 51pc from 14,272 to 21,529, while the Peterborough Telegraph’s figures were up 44pc from 13,834 to 19,948 as a weekly.
At the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, there was a 51pc increase from 15,197 to 22,993, while at sister title the Northants Telegraph, circulation rose 39pc from 17,018 before the relaunch to 23,590 afterwards.
In June, JP chief executive Ashley Highfield said the five titles had an average 77pc increase in sales for the first few weeks after the daily-to-weekly switch.
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Er, hang on a minute. All the other comparisons are against the figures for last year. The figures being compared here are for the period this year when the weeklies were dailies not what they were selling as dailies last year. When you look at the figures for when Scarborough and Peterborough etc. were dailies in the early part of this year they were all running between 7.4 and 10.5% down on 2011. So, knock about 10% of these growth figures and you have a fairer comparison with the other titles.
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So selling 19,000 a week is better than 13,000 six times a week??????
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Curious JP delight at the loss of 5 days a week sale, for a one day sale. Untested, and never can be now, is what the weekly redesign would have done for their daily sales figures. Each town clearly had a much larger sales potential.
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Er, am I missing something? The Chron and the Northants ET are now selling around 150,000 less copies a week compared to last year. How the hell can this news be trumpeted as a success?
What I don’t understand is how can selling less papers be better for business. Surely you should keep them as dailies so you get more advertising in – you could still run a daily outfit on the cheap with less staff, as JP had already been doing. Can somebody explain?
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