It’s hard not to look at the latest UK local newspaper ABC figures and gulp.
Reach’s Birmingham Mail, down 24% year on year, now sells 6,582 copies per day (versus 300,000 a day in the 1980s and 100,000 in 2004).
Print decline is near universal with council-backed propaganda sheets like Love Hackney among the only titles to increase their (free) circulation.
To take the example of Birmingham this all means that, bluntly, there are a lot fewer journalists around than there used to be.
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In 2004 there were 300 journalists working across three daily newspapers and associated weeklies in the West Midlands at Trinity Mirror (as Reach was then called). Today perhaps a third that total remain.
So all this print decline is rather depressing but for today’s journalists and publishers there is good reason to look forward to the future with optimism.
Online the Birmingham Mail (branded as Birmingham Live) reaches a UK audience of 10.4 million per month, according to Ipsos iris.
Given the population of the West Midlands is five million, that stupendous total needs to be treated with some caution. But it clearly suggests this is a digital business that has legs.
Ipsos Iris claims Birmingham Live generates 50m page views a month. That’s equivalent to 250,000 people a month reading roughly 10 pages a day Monday to Friday – so not that far off the level of engagement the title had 20 years ago, assuming each print copy would have been shared 1.5 times.
Birmingham Mail publisher Reach generated £465m in revenue from print in 2021 (the last audited full year available) versus £148m for digital.
The vast majority of that total came from people handing over cash in newsagents (£313m in circulation revenue).
Print revenue was down £22.3m (or 4.7%) but digital revenue grew £30m (or 25%).
So the legacy business of print continues to provide a huge amount of cash every year to fund publishers’ digital transition and arguably has continued far longer than anyone expected it to back in 2008.
And it is fantastically encouraging that digital revenue is starting to more than compensate for print decline.
In 2021, UK regional newspapers as a whole made £250m from online advertising in the UK versus £10bn+ for Meta and Alphabet. This is because no matter how big an audience the publishers attract, they are playing in a casino where the tables are all rigged in favour of the house: the ubiquitous tech platforms that take a slice of all the action.
But a bright light for publishers sits on the horizon in the form of the Digital Markets Unit – the UK’s attempt to follow Australia and Canada and force US tech giants to share more of their revenue with the news industry.
Publishers I have spoken to are optimistic that the Rishi Sunak government has their sympathy and that a positive deal for them is on the way.
So while print decline is bleak, and has been a disaster for journalism, the future is brighter.
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