Is the East Anglian water good for newspaper sales? Ask Archant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/mar/01/local-newspapers-abcs

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To get a proper fix on the state of regional newspaper sales it is necessary to break it down into segments.

I have therefore looked at the latest set of ABC figures for the final six months of 2011, which were released yesterday, by separating dailies from weeklies and also paid-fors from frees.

Then I looked at the results for different owners. Have some publishers performed better than others?

So let's begin with the 67 English dailies included in the audit, only four of which added sales. In the July-December months last year compared to the same period the year before, the overall percentage decline was 7.7%.

There were some stand-out falls, such as the the Nottingham Post with a drop of 17.2%, the Doncaster Star (15.1%) and the Liverpool Post (13.7%). And there were double-digit decreases for titles in Bolton, Carlisle, Leeds, Leicester, Oldham, Newcastle, Scunthorpe, Shropshire, Sunderland and Wolverhampton.

Three of the four titles with plus signs - the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press, the Ipswich-based East Anglian Daily Times and Ipswich Evening Star - recorded only very small increases.

But the fourth, the Norwich Evening News, went completely against the downward trend by adding 7.5%, selling almost 19,000 compared to 17,600 in the previous year.

Looking back over the ABC statistics for the past couple of years, the overall fall of 7.7% is slightly above the norm, suggesting that the decline is accelerating, though slowly.

It may herald the move towards dailies being transformed into weeklies or, just possibly, some closures of the more marginal titles. However, copy sales, as I always stress, are less of a guide to the state of a business than the volume of advertising revenue.

For the record, the overall decline of the eight Scottish dailies and the six Welsh dailies was 7.3% and 7% respectively. In Northern Ireland, the decline for the five dailies averaged 4%.

Of course, all of these newsprint declines have to be seen in the context of rising online use. I am merely painting a picture of the ink-on-paper situation.

So what about the weeklies? The ABC figures cover 696 titles across the UK - 371 paid-fors and 325 frees. Amid the blizzard of minus signs, signalling the long-term run of falling circulations across the industry, there were sales increases for just 22 paid-fors and for 61 frees.

There were some significant rises among the paid-for titles, such as 10% for the Dereham & Fakenham Times; 8.8% for the Alloa & Hillfoots Advertiser; more than 7% for each of the Lowestoft Journal, Beccles & Bungay Journal and Great Yarmouth Mercury; and more than 6% for Lancaster Guardian and Wigan Observer.

As for the frees, the figures are less significant because publishers can simply print and distribute more copies. Some frees have also benefited from closures or mergers.

Now for the matter of ownership. Clearly, the group with a reason to celebrate is Archant. It publishes the four dailies and five of the weeklies that registered sales increases.

The smallish group, Clyde & Forth Press, also saw four weekly titles increase their sales. One of them, The Impartial Reporter of Enniskillen, managed a creditable 3% increase to take it to 13,472 average sales across the six months.

As for the big four chains, there was little to cheer. Very few papers published Trinity Mirror, Johnston Press, Newsquest and Northcliffe Media increased sales.

This does not mean, of course, that consolidation is a recipe for failure. Plenty of smaller publishers also lost sales.

But all owners and managers (and journalists) surely have to ask themselves why Archant is doing so well. Is there something in the water in East Anglia? If so, it needs pumping around the country.

Then again, Archant's decision to stop its London titles being audited by ABC could imply that it likes to conceal bad circulation news.

The company removed all its titles within the M25 from the ABC about 18 months ago. It now has them independently audited, which is fine as long as it publishes those figures so that we can all see how they are doing.

At the time, the company explained that ABC's rules didn't reflect its audience reach for such titles, which are part paid-for, part free and also involve an element of self-selection.

I wouldn't like to see that becoming a habit (Ireland's Independent News & Media pulled out 12 of its titles recently too). We need a single currency and we need transparency.