Daily Post Circulation Down 6% – Leader Up Or Down ???

A national decline in newspaper readership continues to be reflected in local circulations.

The latest ABC circulation figures have been released showing an overall decline in print readerships, with the Daily Post declining again and no new figures offered for NWN publications as they have de-registered.

The latest figures show the Daily Post ‘East’ edition, the one sold around Wrexham, giving a circulation of 8,811, this is a 6.4% drop from a circulation of 9,413 the last time it was reported back in March.

When we did our first round up of the ABC’s back in 2012 the Leader was selling 9,131 copies in Wrexham and the Daily Post was selling 10,505.

Those searching ABC.org.uk for the circulation figures for NWN Media titles ( click here to view the search) now see a ‘no longer registered’ message.

This de-registration covers titles such as the ‘Big’ Leader, The ‘evening’ Leader (Wrexham, Chester and Flintshire editions), the Denbighshire Free Press and The Chester Standard amongst other titles.

The Leader has taken to publishing adverts referring to JICREG figures from April. Reading the JICREG page for the Leader (The old ‘Evening Leader’, with the ‘Big Leader’ known officially as the ‘Wrexham Leader’)  it appears based off the last ABC certificate based on data ending in December 2013 , but giving a different break down to the figures – which we covered back in March.

The JICREG page reports the breakdown of the overall 13,653 figure, for the publications – we have screenshoted and trimmed the table (viewable in full here) to show the location, population and circulation data given, below:

The ABC total for the ‘Wrexham’ edition stated 8,159. Using the JICREG breakdown the Wrexham, Wrexham Rural, Llangollen and Rhos numbers total 7013, we are unsure which other areas are used to calculate the ‘Wrexham’ figure in the ABC stats.

The NWN corporate website still points people to this PDF using 2011 data for the overview ‘circulation and readership’ data.

Other media groups such as Johnston Press and Local World have opted to move to annual reporting, which affects around 100 titles nationwide. NWN Media’s deregistering of their titles does not seem to have been replicated by any other media group that we can spot.

NWN Media have also made industry headlines in recent news that they are set to explore a partnership with Tindle Newspapers. Tindle attempted to purchase a 51% controlling interest in NWN Media last year – for those interested, you can read a report here on the attempted takeover, and the full High Court decision on the outcome here.

Such local trends of dipping circulations are not isolated to Wrexham, with this grim overview showing some publications having double digit reductions.

Wrexham.com readers who are interested in the overall UK regional newspaper performance should look to this article on HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk , an ‘industry’ news website. The comments on that article give an insider viewpoint with many seemingly made by journalists and former editors and is well worth a read.