The Belfast Telegraph was the best-performing UK regional daily in the second half of 2014 according to the regional ABC figures published today.
No regional dailies posted a year-on-year increase in print circulation, with the Bel Tel registering the smallest percentage decrease with -3.4pc.
Best-performing mainland title was the Lancashire Telegraph in Blackburn with a 3.5pc decrease.
Here are the print circulation figures for all UK regional dailies ranked according to the year-on-year circulation change.
| Total | Y-on-Y % | % Paid for | |
| Belfast Telegraph | 45,905 | -3.4 | 75.8 |
| Lancashire Telegraph | 12,814 | -3.5 | 97.7 |
| Guernsey Press and Star | 13,402 | -3.9 | 89.7 |
| Irish News | 38,581 | -4.1 | 99.4 |
| Basildon Echo | 22,313 | -4.1 | 100 |
| Manchester Evening News | 66,193 | -4.5 | 58 |
| The Herald, Glasgow | 37,044 | -4.9 | 100 |
| Grimsby Telegraph | 19,824 | -5.1 | 100 |
| Press and Journal | 60,292 | -5.5 | 99.2 |
| Daily Post, North Wales | 25,422 | -6.3 | 98.1 |
| Western Morning News | 24,977 | -6.4 | 99.9 |
| The Bolton News | 11,777 | -6.7 | 100 |
| Burton Mail | 9,869 | -6.9 | 99.7 |
| Dundee Courier and Advertiser | 46,991 | -7 | 99.5 |
| Gloucestershire Echo | 11,190 | -7 | 98.3 |
| Worcester News | 8,487 | -7.3 | 100 |
| Jersey Evening Post | 15,500 | -7.4 | 97.9 |
| Greenock Telegraph | 11,264 | -7.8 | 100 |
| North West Evening Mail | 10,300 | -8 | 100 |
| Hull Daily Mail | 33,121 | -8.1 | 100 |
| Colchester Gazette | 11,349 | -8.2 | 99.9 |
| Western Daily Press | 19,970 | -8.3 | 100 |
| Gloucester Citizen | 12,744 | -8.3 | 99.5 |
| Oxford Mail | 12,103 | -8.3 | 100 |
| Dundee Evening Telegraph | 18,714 | -8.4 | 99.8 |
| Aberdeen Evening Express | 32,827 | -8.5 | 99.6 |
| News Letter | 17,853 | -8.7 | 99.1 |
| Derby Telegraph | 23,571 | -8.8 | 99.3 |
| Yorkshire Post | 29,298 | -8.9 | 95.5 |
| Southern Daily Echo | 21,185 | -9 | 100 |
| South Wales Argus | 12,671 | -9.2 | 100 |
| The Journal | 16,670 | -9.2 | 99 |
| Ipswich Star | 12,434 | -9.4 | 68.5 |
| Eastern Daily Press | 40,713 | -9.4 | 99.7 |
| Plymouth Herald | 20,715 | -9.4 | 99.9 |
| The Northern Echo | 28,810 | -9.6 | 100 |
| East Anglian Daily Times | 19,725 | -9.6 | 100 |
| South Wales Evening Post | 27,589 | -9.8 | 100 |
| Dorset Echo | 12,359 | -9.9 | 100 |
| Hartlepool Mail | 8,279 | -10.2 | 100 |
| Lancashire Evening Post | 14,047 | -10.3 | 100 |
| The Sentinel, Stoke | 35,112 | -10.3 | 100 |
| Leicester Mercury | 32,225 | -10.5 | 99.1 |
| The Scotsman | 26,283 | -10.8 | 90.6 |
| The News, Portsmouth | 26,439 | -10.9 | 100 |
| The Post, Bristol | 24,127 | -11 | 96.2 |
| Bournemouth Daily Echo | 16,918 | -11.1 | 100 |
| Norwich Evening News | 10,603 | -11.2 | 100 |
| Nottingham Post | 22,356 | -11.2 | 97.9 |
| Teesside Gazette | 26,809 | -11.3 | 100 |
| Newcastle Chronicle | 34,954 | -11.4 | 98.5 |
| The Press, York | 18,148 | -11.7 | 100 |
| Swindon Advertiser | 11,188 | -11.8 | 100 |
| Paisley Daily Express | 5,965 | -11.9 | 100 |
| Carlisle News and Star, East | 8,493 | -12.1 | 100 |
| Edinburgh Evening News | 24,299 | -12.1 | 97.7 |
| Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 14,801 | -12.1 | 100 |
| The Argus, Brighton | 13,309 | -12.2 | 100 |
| Glasgow Evening Times | 31,376 | -12.3 | 100 |
| Shropshire Star | 34,271 | -12.5 | 100 |
| Liverpool Echo | 61,313 | -12.6 | 100 |
| Sheffield Star | 21,437 | -12.7 | 100 |
| Bradford Telegraph and Argus | 17,423 | -12.8 | 100 |
| Oldham Evening Chronicle | 8,994 | -13.1 | 99.2 |
| Carlisle News and Star, West | 3,233 | -13.2 | 100 |
| Express and Star | 71,585 | -13.2 | 89.3 |
| The Gazette, Blackpool | 13,567 | -13.3 | 100 |
| Shields Gazette | 9,426 | -14 | 100 |
| Coventry Telegraph | 21,626 | -15 | 90.9 |
| Wigan Evening Post | 4,264 | -15 | 100 |
| Cambridge News | 15,088 | -15.1 | 88.7 |
| The Western Mail | 19,283 | -15.6 | 96.1 |
| Yorkshire Evening Post | 21,946 | -15.7 | 100 |
| South Wales Echo | 20,433 | -15.8 | 100 |
| Sunderland Echo | 18,876 | -16.8 | 100 |
| Birmingham Mail | 30,597 | -20.5 | 85.6 |
| Doncaster Star | 871 | -25 | 100 |
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For those of us working on Trinity Mirror’s Midland titles, this is like watching a horror film before bedtime.
The Birmingham Mail has a y-on-y drop of -20.5%, and the Coventry Telegraph is -15%.
They are among the worst performing titles in the whole country. It’s just awful.
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Well, that’s interesting reading, glad I’m out of regional newspapers now, it’s just embarrassing. ‘The’ Yorkshire Posts results show a huge relaunch failure. They spent a fortune advertising ‘The’
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Doncaster Star 871 – how long will it last?
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I often wonder what Clark Kent would say about the industry if he was around today.
“Kent, go take some pictures of the snow and put them on Twitter.”
“Golly Mr White, do you not think maybe our readers might stop buying the paper?”
“I don’t pay you to think Kent, we’re living in an ever changing market place and competing with the internet and social media for advertising dollars.”
“But gee Mr White, maybe if we didn’t give our news away for free online people would still buy the paper. And also, if we invested in staff we could gather some quality news that’s worth paying for.”
“Kent, I’ve been here for 37 years and I’m just waiting for a payout. Lois Lane is going to be the new head of digital discombobulation when she comes back from her six hour refresher course.”
Clark would then melt Perry White with his laser eyes and fly to the North Pole, and rightly so.
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Sunderland Echo down 16.8 per cent!!!!
Crikey!
Mind you, those figures are without the Football Echo, which ceased print publication this season.
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Yet more Consistent and huge readership losses time after time for the EDP and Evening news, just how much longer can Archant prop up these two ailing titles?
These dreadful figures must be a complete embarrassment to Jeff Henry,Simon Bax and the rest of the new regime.
they’ve lost their audience, lost all credibility and must surely make serious changes at editorial level before any more damage is done.
its no wonder they want to remove all trace of these two dying papers from the front of their building.
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Well done to the Echo in south Essex for coming in at just 4.1% down, despite a 65p cover price. All credit to Chris Hatton and the hard-working editorial and newspaper sales teams.
I declare an interest as the paper’s former editor, happily retired. Makes a change, perhaps, from grumpy ex hacks saying it was so much better in their day…
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Incredible to see the once respected EDP Sales figures hit these record all time lows, under 41,000 copies must surely herald the end for this title and those responsible for its staggering and very rapid decline.
with the shareholders losing patience,and after all the pomp, bluster and wild promises by the new regime, immediate action needs to be taken either in making this title a free daily or closing it all together.
Couple that with their audience all but gone,little commercial revenue sold to offset the massive losses and it can’t be long before the bean counters and top tablers make big changes.
As for the Norwich evening news the less said about that dreadful publication the better.
Worrying times at Archant towers
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Somebody told me there was a news story in The Teesside Gazette last Friday. Is this true?
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There are many publishers, editors and staff who won’t have slept well after seeing those figures. All well and good digital views are up, but where’s the money?
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No figures for NWN Media titles in North Wales. It seems that they are no longer ABC registered.
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Mrl: I doubt it is true. Wall-to-wall parmo chat I’m afraid. Perhaps they need to start a weekly parmo-focused pull-out, that would certainly boost sales.
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Hidden in the ABC certificates released yesterday is a deeply worrying stat.
Local World/Bristol Post launched their new digital edition for tablets and phones last year to great fanfare.
Guess what average sales per issue are for this digital edition in Bristol – 38!!! Hate to think how much each subscriber has cost to acquire…
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Another -8% for the NW Evening Mail, that’s surely curtains for that crowd.
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Jeff Jones, we’ve heard ALL of that before. Do you have a solution? And I mean a real solution?
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One thing is missing from this story: a regional newspaper group executive saying how “exciting” these statistics are.
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The Dead Tree is, well, dead. Old news doesn’t fly any more, nor should it.
But, with the brightest tech minds like Jeff Bezos determined to return to a rebundling of news, and lucrative ads, the digital age will be very bright indeed.
The future is in tablet newspapers which have all the advantages of print, and none of the obvious drawbacks.
The Zero Sum clickbait game will come to an end very soon; it just doesn’t add up fighting for attention on every article with unlimited sources.
I recommend this article on the digital, rebundled future: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/jeff-bezos-takes-washington-post-into-digital-future-a-1015425.html
The decline of papers is sad, but we must move forward. Legacy, sadly, means very little. Thankfully, the future doesn’t look like the Mail Online, not that this example counts as journalism.
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I think Trinity-Mirror actually see plummeting sales as a mark of success. They are so website-obsessed that falling circulation seems to be one of the measures of how good you are at being totally digital first.
To be fair, they are driving up the click count fantastically well… but how many people will they employ when the print cash generator finally grinds to a halt and they have to rely on webcash?
Time for my happy pills…
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Why has an editor left Belfast, sales 45,000 for Brighton, sales an alarming 13,000. Exciting challenge no doubt. Maybe it’s just warmer.
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Can things get any worst at the MNA! We’ll done to the new CEO and out of touch top level management. Nobody could have ever imagined quite how quickly you could have run two of Britain’s greatest regional newspapers into the ground!
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JohnnyRice
That’s easy, the solution is to do what all well run businesses do, stop expecting people to pay more money for products of declining quality. I can think of no industry – none – which gives away its products for free and continually puts prices up while continually eroding its calibre.
The argument isn’t especially about digital vs print, it’s about print vs digital garbage. It’s not news, it’s pictures of a sunset or a poll about what’s bets between red and brown sauce.
If the print industry ‘must’ go down the digital route then why doesn’t it do it properly? If it wants video on the website, why don’t newspaper groups hire professional camera and sound crews and get them to do it well, rather than expect a reporter to film something on their phone and upload it via some freeware website?
Why doesn’t the industry hire people with bona fide web and social media experience? Why aren’t there people from Google and Facebook at these newspapers instead of the editor’s mate or an out of work sub who’s merely had their role redefined?
A friend of mine was once infamously asked by a multimedia editor (a former news editor) what a hyperlink was.
The people at the top are just protecting their own jobs and those of their friends, so they’re merely paying lip service to attempts to move to a digital first business. In the newspaper industry, a multimedia expert is a 50 year old sub editor wearing an angry birds T-shirt.
For me, daily newspapers are finished long term in print form, nationals especially, they can’t compete in print with the TV and internet, but they can exist as QUALITY multimedia outlets.
Weekly Newspapers still have a future though because, and this is something many of the top brass don’t get, people don’t buy weeklies just for news, they buy them for entertainment. They carry articles and features that can’t be found on the BBC or on Twitter because they’re of no interest outside that town.
People don’t just buy the weekly to see what that police siren was all about last night, they buy it to be enetertained and feel closer to their community. They read a bit, put it down by the telly, read a bit more on Sunday, their son reads it when he comes for dinner, then it gets passed to the neighbour – that kind of publication is NOT competing with Twitter.
Many of my friends don’t buy daily newspapers any more yet they still spend 20 quid a month on magazines, why is that?
These weeklies are struggling because quality has been cut, because as with all things, it takes an age to build a reputation but only an instant to ruin it, and UGC garbage, rubbish pictures and overworked journos who don’t know the area will do that.
The industry needs the right people in the right place, it needs to focus on quality, and weeklies need to be viewed as quality entertainment products rather than just news ones.
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its almost criminal that what were once ‘flagship’ titles in the Archant fleet eg EADT,EDP,NEN and some weekly titles have been allowed to decline at such a rapid pace in so short a period of time.
The diminishing number of people buying these papers and the huge fall off in commercial revenues must surely have been a call to action by the board, yet what do they do? Nothing.
The same people are still managing to cling on to their positions while all around them chaos ensues and Rome burns.
It should have come as no surprise that by dumbing down the quality in both staff and content that you soon end up losing your once loyal audience base, the ones that buy the papers and advertise to reach an audience,and that if you don’t move with the times you’ll soon be left behind, archant are so left behind they’re almost going backwards.
Can the bean counters really expect local bisinessss to spend their hard earned cash advertising their goods and services to a vastly reduced audience and with no relative overall reduction in the rate? I’m told everything is either sold last minute cheapo cheapo or incentivised for the sales reps, both strategies that smack of desperation and panic when belief in the product and selling the benefits fails.
New publications that target areas or markets are thriving as a result and are capturing revenues by offering quality products and content, professional advice and service and more importantly an audience.
These latest embarrassing ABC figures further emphssise just how far behind and out of touch with their audience Archant clearly is.
If you want to see the real cost of continuous cost cutting and the cold hard facts of putting people out of their depth in positions of authority then look no further than what’s happened to Archant.
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Mansfield Man’s post about the non-existent take-up of the Bristol Post’s digital edition sums up the predicament we are in. Very Old Hack’s question – “where is the money online?” – has no answer in terms of a viable solution. We are truly up the Creek Which Hath No Name on a family website like HTFP.
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Reading all this, I felt like having a rant, particularly about Archant and its early indifference to the Web and the potential of electronic media and re-evaluating news values and content delivery, when I thought: What’s the point? It’s all too late.
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At an all time low of 40,700 copies,the EDP Norwich is still claiming to be ‘ the country’s biggest selling regional paper’ I see
They’ll be claiming Mustard Tv is Britains most watched tv channel next
Have they never heard of the trades description act I wonder ?
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How scary looking at these figures. I remember working as a reporter at the Shropshire Star and celebrating 100,000 daily sales. Looking at the latest circulation figure it can only be matter of months until it goes free or the Shropshire Star brand disappears altogether. RIP regional newspapers
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All in all this is very bleak reading. I am particularly saddened by the figures for Scotland’s big three dailies. I worked for The Herald, The Scotsman and Press and Journal during the mid to late 1990s when all three had circulations in the region of 100,000 a day. Indeed The Scotsman had aspirations to be a UK national and even flew copies to London each night. Now to see 37,000, 26,000 and 60,000 respectively you must wonder where their future lies. Only the P&J seems to be stemming the downturn a little, probably due to the vast rural area it covers where superfast broadband has yet to make an impact?
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You have to admire Archants arrogant ‘crisis? What crisis?’ Attitude to the staggering and embarsssing collapse of their Norfolk and suffolk print readership figures.
One wonders just how long they will be allowed to turn the other cheek with the shareholders demanding action and the board under intense pressure to deliver profits
So much for Jeff Henrys empty boast of turning Archant into the leading regional news group in the country
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Employee x is spot on and judging by the number of likes to the comments i am not the only one who thinks so either.
jeff Henry would do well to take note of the points raised in employee x and other postings on here instead of listening to the yes men he surrounds himself with.
With copy sales at all time lows and falling further through the floor with each set of ABC figures, and with commercial revenues in a downward spiral,doing nothing is not the answer.
Jeff Henry too will be judged on his actions not his words so it will be interesting to see what he does in the face of such dreadful and damaging results such as these latest embarsssing figures
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