Can anyone throw any light on this little puzzle? According to the Newsquest website, it publishes "almost 300 weekly newspapers" in Britain, including 17 daily titles. Its US parent, Gannett, claims on its website that Newsquest's portfolio includes 17 paid-for daily newspapers plus almost 300 non-daily publications. It also states that Newsquest is the UK's second largest regional newspaper.
But the Newspaper Society website tells a very different story in its list of the top 20 regional publishers (dated January 2008). It records that Newsquest publishes a total of only 210 titles, including 18 daily titles.
Unlike Newsquest and Gannett, it breaks that total down further: 68 paid-for weeklies, 123 weekly frees plus one paid-for Sunday. It also places Newsquest as the third largest regional publisher (by circulation), behind Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press.
How can this be explained? Have the Newspaper Society's usually reliable statisticians got it wrong? It appears not. The discrepancy evidently occurs because the NS works to specific criteria about what constitutes a paper. For example, fortnightly or monthly publications are not counted, nor are specialist publications or magazines.
Fair enough. Such publications cannot be defined as newspapers in the terms used by the NS and, I would suggest, the rest of us.
Surely Newsquest/Gannett should make this clear too because stories about the companies - examples here and here - routinely refer to 300 newspapers.
