All but one UK regional daily saw a year-on-year drop in circulation in the first half of 2013 according to the latest ABC figures.
The Trinity Mirror-owned Paisley Daily Express was the only paid-for daily title to post a sales rise in the period January to June with its circulation up 9.9pc.
Here’s the full list of how the regional daily and Sunday titles performed, in order of percentage sales increase or decrease.
A small number of daily titles do not appear in the list as they have switched from six-monthly to annual auditing. They include the Western Morning News, Derby Telegraph, Gloucestershire Echo and The Citizen, Gloucester.
Title | Jun-13 | % paid-for | Change |
Paisley Daily Express | 7,567 | 100pc | 9.9pc |
Irish News | 40,842 | 99.4pc | -3pc |
Guernsey Press & Star | 14,448 | 92.2pc | -3.8pc |
Cambridge News | 18,586 | 83.3pc | -3.9pc |
Press & Journal, Aberdeen | 65,482 | 99.2pc | -4.6pc |
Birmingham Mail | 40,280 | 86.6pc | -4.7pc |
Jersey Evening Post | 17,076 | 97.9pc | -4.7pc |
Oxford Mail | 16,569 | 100pc | -5.6pc |
Sunday Life | 45,768 | 98.7pc | -6.1pc |
The Leader, Wrexham, | 14,322 | 100pc | -6.5pc |
News Letter, Ulster | 20,755 | 99.3pc | -6.5pc |
Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 17,704 | 100pc | -6.7pc |
The Western Mail | 23,723 | 94.6pc | -6.7pc |
Manchester Evening News | 73,622 | 64.7pc | -6.8pc |
Dorset Echo | 15,195 | 100pc | -6.9pc |
Dundee Courier & Advertiser | 52,348 | 99.5pc | -6.9pc |
Burton Mail | 10,785 | 99.5pc | -7.1pc |
Hull Daily Mail | 38,309 | 100pc | -7.1pc |
Liverpool Echo | 74,984 | 100pc | -7.2pc |
North Wales Daily Post | 28,331 | 100pc | -7.4pc |
The Sentinel | 41,898 | 100pc | -7.6pc |
Dundee Evening Telegraph | 20,734 | 99.8pc | -7.8pc |
Swindon Advertiser | 15,506 | 100pc | -7.9pc |
South Wales Argus | 19,748 | 100pc | -7.9pc |
South Wales Echo | 27,700 | 100pc | -8.2pc |
The Echo, Southend/Basildon | 26,705 | 100pc | -8.3pc |
The Northern Echo | 35,196 | 100pc | -8.5pc |
Carlisle News and Star West | 3,933 | 100pc | -8.6pc |
South Wales Evening Post | 33,479 | 98.2pc | -8.6pc |
Belfast Telegraph | 49,228 | 77.2pc | -8.6pc |
North West Evening Mail | 11,739 | 100pc | -8.9pc |
The Press, York | 22,057 | 100pc | -9.3pc |
Express & Star | 90,612 | 91.2pc | -9.6pc |
Yorkshire Post | 34,175 | 96pc | -9.7pc |
Carlisle News and Star East | 10,162 | 100pc | -9.8pc |
Southern Daily Echo | 26,846 | 100pc | -10.4pc |
Worcester News | 11,922 | 100pc | -10.4pc |
The Journal, Newcastle | 20,875 | 100pc | -10.4pc |
Bradford Telegraph & Argus | 21,641 | 100pc | -10.4pc |
The Post, Bristol | 29,475 | 97.1pc | -10.7pc |
Teesside Evening Gazette | 33,013 | 100pc | -10.7pc |
Coventry Telegraph | 27,712 | 92.9pc | -10.8pc |
Aberdeen Evening Express | 38,409 | 99.7pc | -10.8pc |
Eastern Daily Press | 47,231 | 99.7pc | -11.3pc |
Bournemouth Daily Echo | 22,007 | 100pc | -11.4pc |
Leicester Mercury | 40,172 | 99pc | -11.6pc |
Nottingham Post | 27,086 | 99.7pc | -11.6pc |
The Chronicle, Newcastle | 43,308 | 100pc | -12pc |
Lancashire Telegraph | 18,293 | 100pc | -12.3pc |
Wigan Evening Post | 5,446 | 100pc | -12.3pc |
Wales on Sunday | 23,416 | 100pc | -12.4pc |
Shields Gazette | 12,004 | 100pc | -12.5pc |
The Bolton News | 17,199 | 100pc | -12.9pc |
Shropshire Star | 43,097 | 100pc | -13.4pc |
Sunday Mercury | 31,982 | 93pc | -13.6pc |
The Gazette, Blackpool | 16,524 | 100pc | -13.9pc |
Oldham Evening Chronicle | 11,045 | 100pc | -14pc |
Yorkshire Evening Post | 28,946 | 100pc | -14.4pc |
Evening Times, Glasgiow | 39,234 | 100pc | -14.6pc |
Sunderland Echo/Football Echo | 24,994 | 100pc | -14.9pc |
Edinburgh Evening News | 30,176 | 98.3pc | -15.3pc |
Colchester Daily Gazette | 12,889 | 100pc | -15.5pc |
Lancashire Evening Post | 17,212 | 100pc | -15.5pc |
Hartlepool Mail | 10,521 | 100pc | -17.7pc |
Norwich Evening News | 12,947 | 100pc | -17.8pc |
The News, Portsmouth | 30,570 | 100pc | -17.9pc |
Ipswich Star | 15,084 | 68.7pc | -18.2pc |
Sunday Sun | 37,588 | 100pc | -19.4pc |
East Anglian Daily Times | 22,652 | 99.9pc | -21.2pc |
Doncaster Star | 1,441 | 100pc | -25.4pc |
The Argus, Brighton | 16,622 | 100pc | -25.8pc |
Well done John H and his hardworking team at the PDE. This figure shows it can be done.
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Ouch there are some big drops there! Kudos for bucking a trend, like, but the rest is eyewatering.
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Eyebrox,
That 10% is very few copies compared with what, for example, the Irish News would have to muster to get their 10%!
Granted their figures were up but that’s like saying the Doncaster Star’s in freefall when 14 people moved house.
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I suppose it can be done when newspapers are invested in and not decimated and overlooked in favour of the latest fad!
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Circulation at teh Birghton Argus cut in half in three years – ouch!
Time it went to a freebie? Obviously finding it impossible to compete with Metro and Evening Standard.
Not surprising when a large population commutes into London and probably moved from London so have little or no real affinity for a place.
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Brighton Argus needs a new Editor fast!
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Another horrendous drop for The Gazette, Blackpool, and no wonder. On one side its full of seedy, trashy court stories splashed all over the pages. Residents know the place has problems, but they don’t want these written up like some pale imitation of a red-top and shoved down their throats every day.
On the other side you have weekly-style “community news” where everything is awesome, fantastic, cool so that it reads like a public relations brochure.
The only “campaign” I can recall is one on behalf of the corporate entertainments industry in favour of early hours boozing. That has gone down like a lead balloon with potential readers who have to put up with drunks, fights, vandalism, etc, outside their front doors.
It may get a few adverts, but it won’t do anything for circulation.
The paper, like the Manchester Evening News, does not know who its readers are. That’s partly because both papers are increasingly staffed by middle class graduates churned out by the journalism colleges who live in their own little bubble.
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I’m surprised any of these newspaper have survived so long once the monopoly on press releases disappeared when the internet came in. I would hazard that you could condense the amount of original content per paper, per issue into a single page on most papers.
Local newspapers are rubbish – let’s not pretend otherwise – and how many people under the age of 40 would ever pay for a copy? Some of the comments on this feed are also laughable: I’ve been a journalist for nearly 20 years and to suggest that newspapers don’t do any real journalism now due to cuts is very wide of the mark – they rarely ever did! Blaming “middle class graduates churned out by journalism colleges” for the demise of a crap product is also dumb – it’s more likely that they can create better stories than the tired old hacks on here begging for redundancy.
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These are difficult times for newspapers. Almost all of them are losing sales and journalists on a number of these titles are being forced to watch as the fat-cat owners of their papers gleefully hasten the decline, hiking cover prices and maximising profits with no concern for the devastating long-term consequences. It seems they don’t care about the loss of readers or the despair of their staff. Few of them focus their blinkered eyes on anything beyond the next three months.
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Dear me.
What a hatchet job on the Gazette.
You wouldn’t happen to have any connection with the Blackpool Citizen, would you, Mr Dover?
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Yet another complete disaster for Archant in Norfolk and Suffolk, theyre a rudderless ship crashing from one crisis to the next,i can only assume on the back of these god awful figures they will at least be reducing their ad rates to reflect the diminishing audience for their two (morning) papers in Norwich,How sad to see how far the once mighty have fallen in such a relatively short time .
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Paisley Express is one of the few (if not the only) regional title in which Trinity Mirror has invested. What does that tell you?
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What’s happened to the Derby Telegraph figures?
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I think it’s inevitable some of these dailies, such as the Lancashire Evening Post, will be turned into weeklies within a year, based on those figures.
Explains why JP registered lancashirepost.co.uk as a domain in May last year.
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I think Neil Hodge is a little unkind when he states “Local newspapers are rubbish – let’s not pretend otherwise”. There are some poor local papers, but there are also some good local papers.
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In reply to Bluestringer…No I don’t have any connection with the Blackpool Citizen.
In reply to Mr Hodge…Some of the graduates are fine, as long as they are writing for the Guardian or New Statesman or something equally erudite (should that be pretentious?).
The problem is, there aren’t many Guardian or New Statesman readers in Blackpool.
What I am saying is that today regional journalists too often come from the same narrow background. Looking at the evenings, I get the impression that all page designers are trying to get jobs on the Daily Star.
It’s ironic that while journalists have never been better educated than they are today, their product has never been so boring.
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