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Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.

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May 23, 2013updated 24 May 2013 2:07pm

Telegraph cements place as only profitable mainstream ‘quality’ national with £58.4m surplus for 2012

By Dominic Ponsford

Telegraph Media Group has claimed a slight improvement in operating profit for 2012 despite a marginal fall in turnover.

The publisher of the Telegraph print titles and website revealed this morning that operating profit for 2012 was £58.4m compared with £55.7m in 2011. Turnover was said to be down 1 per cent to £327.5m.

The privately-owned company released the figures this morning and said they were based on financial statements filed with Companies House.

The Telegraph is  theonly  mainstream 'quality' newspaper group to turn a profit. The Times tiitles, Guardian News and Media and the Independent titles are all heavily loss- making.

The only other up-market UK national newspaper title to make money is the Financial Times. FT Group, which mainly comprises the Financial Times, made an operating profit of £49m in 2012 on turmover of £443m.

TMG said: "Whilst print advertising revenues declined year on year it was encouraging that growth in digital and consumer revenues significantly mitigated this decline. Circulation revenues declined year on year.

"The marginal decline in revenues was offset by reduced costs, helped in particular by lower newsprint prices. As a result of this, and a continuing investment in digital development, there was an increase in operating profit of £2.7 million."

Earlier this year Telegraph Media Group cut 80 editorial jobs and created 50 new digital journalism positions.

There was more encouraging news for TMG yesterday when official figures revealed that the launch of a metered paywall policy for Telegraph.co.uk has had no significant effect on the overall volume of traffic to the site.

The Telegraph begain charging readers of its international site who wanted to read more than 20 articles a month six months ago. The metered paywall was extended to the UK site at the end of March.

Daily Mail and General Trust revealed yesterday that declining print advertising revenue for the Mail national newspaper titles was now being more than made up for by growing online advertisng.

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