Now here’s a surprise. Mike Gilson, award-winning editor of the Belfast Telegraph, has quit to become editor of the Brighton Argus.
He is on his way to holding the record for the most daily editorships. The Argus will be his fifth. He edited the Bel Tel for five years, having previously edited The Scotsman (two-and-a-half years), The News in Portsmouth (six years) and the Peterborough Telegraph (four years).
Gilson had a tough job in Belfast, but the Argus may prove tougher still. Its print sales have been under-performing the market for a good while, exacerbated by an unwise price hike in September 2012.
During the first six months of this year, the Argus’s average daily sale fell to 14,370. That was 13.6% fewer than in the same period of 2013.
My inside information - I live part of the year in the city - is that the paper, which is published by Newsquest/Gannett, barely manages to sell 12,000 copies on several days a week.
But the world is moving online of course. So the good news, as relayed by the outgoing editor, Michael Beard, last month, is that the Argus’s combined print and digital audience “continues to grow.”
He said: “We now have approaching 39,000 people every day reading the paper and just over 40,000 unique visitors connecting with the Argus online every day.”
He also said the paper had “just recorded a monthly online audience of more than 1m people.”
Gilson, who extolled the Bel Tel’s digital advances in an email exchange with me in August, says he is “tremendously excited” by his “challenging” new post, adding:
“I have a track record at producing compelling newspapers and websites. This will continue.”
One interesting difference he will face is over online access. Gilson was a great enthusiast for the paywall - see his Press Gazette interview in September here - but the Argus is still free to browse.
So what about the Bel Tel? The Independent News & Media (INM) title recorded a daily average sale of 48,014 in the first half of this year, some 2.5% fewer than the year before.*
Again, the online story was much brighter, with Gilson saying that the paper’s website attracted 3.5m uniques in the month of July.
The Dublin-based INM is now searching for three editors. It has yet to appoint a full-time editor to its flagship title in the Republic, the Irish Independent, after its editor departed in August. And last month it announced that it had begun a search to replace Anne Harris as editor of the Sunday Independent.
Sources: HoldTheFrontPage (1), (2) and (3)/Press Gazette/Personal knowledge
*In the original posting, it stated that the sale was 49,228, representing an 8.6% loss. These were the figures for the previous year. Apologies for the error.
