More circulation pain

The news on the circulation front continues to be bad for the Welsh regional press. Year-on-year figures dropped again with the Cardiff-based Western Mail and South Wales Echo between them recording the biggest percentage fall  of just over 10%.

The daily tabloid which proclaims itself the National Newspaper for Wales now has a circulation of under 30,000 and shows no sign of reversing the downward trend.

Figures published by industry body ABC are as follows:

South Wales Evening Post: 42,619 (-7.5%)

South Wales Echo: 35,389 (-10.1%)

Daily Post (Wales): 32,414 (-4.5%)

Western Mail: 29,567 (-10.2%)

South Wales Argus: 24,679 (-7.5%)

The depressing fall in sales will undoubtedly spark renewed debate in many quarters on the future of hard copy news as a medium within an industry increasingly dominated by internet publishing. One recent study reported that the daily newspaper is now the primary source of information for just 28% of the UK population. The projection is for the share to fall still further.  

Proprietors have been looking at the performance of the pay-to-read Times Online site. Results are said to be mixed since its launch six months ago with almost as many advertisers leaving as signing up. Nevertheless, the News of the World is the next Murdoch title to become a subscription site and both Trinity Mirror and DGMT are said to be considering rolling out limited versions of their flagship papers sometime next year.

A further expectation is for more and louder lamentations from the Society of Editors over how a decline in readership figures is linked to the advent of council sponsored free-sheets – despite the awkward fact that no-one has ever really managed to prove this to be the case; quantitatively speaking.

One of the few areas of agreement among the print barons is that the prospect of assistance from Westminster or Cardiff Bay is very remote indeed. What's more, with pressure growing for a much-troubled S4C to be adopted as the Assembly’s sickly child, any suggestion of a new subsidised Welsh language newspaper can be considered effectively stillborn.