‘The model is broken’: UK’s regional newspapers fight for survival in a digital world
“It’s becoming like the Hunger Games for journalists,” says one reporter, summing up the increasing uncertainty of life working in the economically precarious regional newspaper industry.
In the space of two months, Reach, the UK’s biggest regional and local newspaper owner with hundreds of titles and sites including the Birmingham Mail, Liverpool Echo and Manchester Evening News, has embarked on two rounds of cuts, putting about 620 jobs at risk.
As a listed company, the travails at Reach, which also owns the Mirror and Express nationals, provide the most public insight into an industry-wide struggle to find a sustainable model for local journalism in an increasingly digital media age.
The numbers make for bleak reading: in the past decade about 300 local newspapers have shut as print advertising, the once mighty backbone and lifeblood of the market, has lost more than £1bn in value, mostly to digital companies such as Facebook and Google.
In the mid-noughties, when Facebook was in its infancy, the UK regional newspaper advertising market was worth £2.5bn. At the end of last year it was valued at £241m.
“It is a challenged market for sure,” says Douglas McCabe, the chief executive at Enders Analysis. “In terms of a print business, circulation has been falling away at rates of decline that are pretty worrying, volumes are probably down around 65% over the last 10 or 12 years.
“Publishers have some levers, increase cover price and reduce pagination, but it does feel like we are getting toward a period where the industrial scale of print is looking quite small and a lot less sustainable.”
Consolidation remains key, with most of the UK regional newspaper market controlled by only three big publishers – Reach, Newsquest and
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