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Free weekly newspaper axed by Newsquest

A free weekly newspaper owned by regional publishers Newsquest has been axed.

The Oxford Star was published for the final time on 20 June and a short article, pictured below, informed readers about its closure.

It ceased publication shortly before sister regional daily the Oxford Mail announced an increase in its cover price from 45p to 65p from Monday, along with increased pagination and more news, sport and features.

The Star had a circulation of 21,002 at the latest ABC figures published in February – up 7.2pc year-on-year – and around one-third of these were from free pickup copies, with the rest from letterbox delivery.

The paper’s article about its own closure said: “This will be the last edition of the Oxford Star.

“You can still keep up to date with all the news from your area with the Oxford Mail – Oxford’s daily paper which will be bigger, better and brighter from Monday, July 1.”

Earlier this week group editor Simon O’Neill hit out at “churnalism” on local papers as he told readers about the Mail’s relaunch,  saying the paper needed to charge a “fair” price if it was to continue to set the news agenda for its patch.

Simon has not so far responded to requests for a comment.

2 comments

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  • July 4, 2013 at 12:04 pm
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    Not long for The Brighton Argus to shut its doors as well,we are moving out of our offices in Brighton in the next six months,nowhere to go at the moment,years of redundancies,the pain of working there with this black Newsquest Cloud hanging over us.The problem being nobody in Brighton wants to buy the paper anymore (not surprising at 65p on a weekday and 85p on a Saturday) with pages of stories from many years gone by (all black and white) with pages and pages of youth in action,taking up the spaces that once was full of adverts.

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  • July 4, 2013 at 8:04 pm
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    I so hope this is wrong. The Argus was once such a great paper to work for. It should forget about the rest of sleepy Sussex (as I remember it in my six years there) and get stuck into
    Brighton properly with more reporters employed.
    It wasn’t the journos that reduced sales from 100,000 plus a day
    to under 20,000. In later years bedevilled by terrible management, and the decision to become a next morning paper instead of a once brilliant same-day paper doomed it.
    Shame is newspaper bosses don’t care about falling circulation or quality or staff levels despite their mouthing…. just web income.
    The end could come quicker for many papers than people think. But I hope the Argus survives.

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