Just in case anyone is in any doubt of the magnitude of the crisis facing regional newspapers, Clare Enders has really spelled it out. Speaking at a Westminster Media Forum event today, the CEO and founder of Enders Analysis predicted that one third of the country’s 1,300 regional newspapers and two nationals could go out of business in the next five years making 10,000 people redundant — half the people working in the sector.
She says (via Press Gazette): “Local newspapers in particular are carrying the full pain of the terrible decline of the local communities in this country which is happening and will accelerate as the retailers die on the High Street.” She joins a long list of analysts sounding the death knell for printed newspapers, including Deloitte which predicts that one in ten papers and magazines will fold in the “downward spiral”.
— Too much doom? Is she guilty of peddling kind of unfounded doom-mongering so detested by newspaper CEOs like Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey? Probably not. Newspapers are closing and a rapid rate, especially the 640 or so weekly, free ones. This week Newsquest announced it was to shut up to 11 free weeklies and all the main publishers have shut free titles in the past year. The dramatic slide in classified advertising money has been deadly for them and these papers don’t see the sort of digital investment their big-city cousins have received in the past few years. So while the Birmingham Post gets a multi-million pound make-over online and in print and its managers spend much of their time wondering how to monetise their online content, small-town weeklies rely on the same dribble of print classified ad revenue they always have.
— Relax acquisition M&A rules: Enders joined JP Morgan in calling for the competition rules on media M&A to be relaxed to allow smaller titles to be bought out by rival publishers. Here she has a point — Cambridge Evening News publisher Illiffe News and Media said in the summer (via PG) that the threat of Competition Commission intervention prevented it from making a bid for eight free, weekly newspapers Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) shut down in April. The commission stepped in when Johnston Press made a bid for the same papers in 2002. More newspaper gloom after the jump…
— No bids for locals: She says private equity companies’ interest in regional papers evaporated when DMGT decided against selling its regional arm Northcliffe Media due to perceived under-pricing. “Everybody’s been trying to get out of the local press,” she says. “If DMGT had been able to get £950 million for Northcliffe they would be in a much better shape today.”
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