Time for a nationalised newspaper?

According to the Press Gazette, the beleaguered regional newspaper industry continues to lose print readers at an alarming rate. Only two out of 86 daily regional titles managed to increase sales between July and December. Figures released today show a similarly dire situation in Wales:

• South Wales Evening Post - 43,644 (down 8.8%)
• South Wales Echo - 36,928 (down 11.1%)
• Daily Post - 32,864 (down 5.0%)
• Western Mail - 30,133 (down 10.6%)
• South Wales Argus - 25,035 (down 7.6%)
• Wrexham Leader - 18,368 (down 8.5%)

Trinity Mirror are among the hardest hit with the Western Mail and Daily Post following the trend seen at the Liverpool Daily Post which suffered a staggering 20.8 per cent drop. But the news is bad across the industry as the twin screws of falling circulation and elusive advertising revenue further tighten on already stretched staff budgets and editorial costs.

 

And as one industry watcher has already observed, a similar squeeze on resources in the public sector will probably see the steady staple supply of cut-and-paste copy from internal communications teams drying up in future as redundancies & cutbacks take hold.

 

Whether the public and media relations outfits operating in Wales can take up some of the anticipated slack is very much an unknown factor. But with such a symbiosis producing the inevitable blurred line between media coverage and marketing, perhaps this is the time to brush the dust off the perennial suggestion of a print equivalent of the BBC in Wales.