Steve Dyson, a former editor of the Birmingham Mail (2005-09), has entered the debate over his old newspaper’s current crisis.
(For new readers, the paper’s owner, Trinity Mirror, has demanded a new tranche of job cuts while admitting to staff that it can no longer offer comprehensive coverage of the city - see here and here).
Dyson sportingly concedes that the newsprint Mail was suffering from long-term circulation decline when he took over and that it continued to lose sale during his stewardship. (That situation was, of course, similar at every UK regional daily).
Then, in an attempt to explain what caused the Mail’s “deep decline” to a print sale of about 27,000 copies a day, he offers “nine wider, historical reasons” why he thinks the Mail “may become either a weekly or online-only product by 2020”.
It’s an interesting list, worth a read by everyone who wants to underdstand the long-term decline of regional titles.
Dyson concludes by saying that Trinity Mirror “is not tackling a one-off ‘balancing the books’ challenge in the Midlands; it’s arguably strangling titles that have already had the lifeblood of editorial resources and morale repeatedly squeezed out of them for 30 years”.
Source: HoldTheFrontPage
