Not as easy as ABC

No one was surprised that last week's local newspaper ABCs showed, for the most part, continued year-on-year decline for titles across the UK. But what's the real story, and - more importantly - what's the real answer?
We know that circulation figures only tell half the story, and there are several other trends here. Here are just a few:

Print circulation decline

Among the carnage, there's an interesting trend - the tiny minority of titles to record growth have been the smallest weekly local newspapers. Should we see this as more evidence of the demand for the niche?

Free newspapers

Several papers, including the Liverpool Daily Post and Manchester Evening News, saw paid circulation fall substantially as they introduced free copies.

Does this strategy leave newspapers at the mercy of a more fickle advertising market, or is it worth sacrificing the minority income from cover sales for potential extra readership?

The evenings that aren't evenings

Why are several reborn "morning" newspapers - like the Oxford Mail and Swindon Advertiser - still listed as evening papers? The answer, says ABC, is that they were originally registered as evening papers and so are still listed as such. If it looks like a fish and smells like a fish - isn't it a fish?

Propaganda from the Newspaper Society

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the lobby group put out a survey with lots of jolly, sparkly news about the local newspaper industry. The report estimates there are 49,246 employees across the industry, 26.5% of whom are editorial and 31.7% advertising. This backs up the oft-repeated quote by Mark Dodson, chief executive of Guardian Media Group's regional newspapers: "We work in the advertising business and we've been kidding ourselves for 20 years that we work in the newspaper industry."

Part of the release was the most mind-boggling piece of stat-mashing, attributed to society president Russell Whitehair: "Growth in local newspaper websites means they now collectively represent one of the top UK online properties, attracting an estimated 20 million unique users a month - which would put it above the BBC, alongside Yahoo! and within striking distance of eBay, MSN and Google."

Or, to put it another way, even if you bundle together the estimated audience for all 1,102 local newspaper websites, that's still nowhere near as many unique users as the leading search engine. Right.

Jemima Kiss
Monday September 3, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk