If Print’s Goal Is To Maintain Readership, Then The Manchester, UK, Experiment Seems To Have Worked, But They’re Giving Away Twice The Number Of Papers They Had Planned On

Philip M. Stone March 4, 2008

Over the past couple of years ftm has kept a close watch on two regional UK newspapers that took different approaches to stem drastically falling circulation – the Manchester Evening News that embarked on new marketing ground by giving away 50,000 issues downtown while maintaining sales in the suburbs, and the Birmingham Mail that went through a complete relaunch concentrating on local news, and enough time has now passed to see what worked and what didn’t.

Manchester can lay claim to increasing total circulation by some 34% reaching its initial goal of a total 180,000 circulation, but to do it the paper is giving away more copies than it is selling. It thought it would sell about two-thirds of the total and give away the remaining third. In Birmingham circulation has just kept sinking and the Mail is now pinning most of its hopes on a newly launched web site.

British regional newspapers suffer the same problems as US metropolitan newspapers -- sinking circulation and advertising. If there is a common theme in the results from the Manchester and Birmingham attacks on those evils it would seem  to be that the print “paid-for” model may well be on its way out for  non-national newspapers, taken over perhaps by a combination of paid and free plus the free web site. 

In Manchester, the latest audit numbers for the Evening News show total circulation of 180,900  with free circulation at 98,455 and paid-for sales at 82,445. That’s shy of the 200,000 total circulation that management said it had hoped to achieve by end of 2007 but they’ll be happy all the same at having the UK’s highest regional total circulation. And they’re especially happy since they have persuaded the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) to agree to list total cross-platform circulation – paid and free – whereas in the past the audit board would only record paid circulation. Those cross-platform numbers also showed the newspaper achieved an average 73,304 daily unique users to its web site.

But things have not gone exactly as management might have hoped. The original idea put into effect in May, 2006, was to give away 50,000 copies downtown where the newspaper only had around 7,000 daily sales anyway and continue selling in the suburbs where it had around 127,000 sales. The idea was to keep those suburban sales intact and circulation would jump to around 180,000 copies.

But Mr. and Mrs. Manchester Public saw it differently. Why pay for something that one can get for free? Gradually the newspaper had to start giving away more copies – it went to 60,000, and it didn’t take too long before that number reached 92,000 and now it just shy of 100,000. But in the suburbs those 127,000 paid sales have nose-dived to 81,000 – a decline of 36% -- so the targeted total is there but not with the circulation revenue that the newspaper had hoped for. In the past year alone, its paid circulation fell 13.5% and in the past six months it was down 6.4%, the worst paid-for sales performance of any UK regional newspaper.

But the important thing, the newspaper believes, is that it can still take that 180,000 figure, with the blessing of the audit folks, to advertisers and that’s the bottom line. According to Mark Rix, managing director of MEN Media, in its first year of paid-free implementation national advertising revenue increased 8%.

But Rix also made clear he values the paid circulation. “We acknowledge that these remain challenging times for our industry and we have responded by breaking new ground in how we get the news to people in our area. When we took the bold decision to introduce a part free, part paid Manchester Evening News, we were responding to the needs of readers and advertisers and taking control of our future. We aren’t frightened of facing the circulation decline of the regional press full on and looking for ways to attract new readers, while maintaining our important paid-for readers.” The question, of course, is how many of those 81,000 remaining paid-fors can he hold onto.

Founded in 1868, The Evening News in its heyday had a circulation of more than 500,000. Today Manchester is the UK’s eighth largest metropolitan area with a population of some 400,000 and about 250,000 daily commuters.  And Manchester, like cities throughout the UK, has seen for some years newspaper circulation in continual decline. Editor Paul Horrocks said before the experiment, “We had actually extrapolated our rate of decline and found that by 2025 we wouldn’t have anything left.”

Other newspapers such as the Liverpool Post  are adapting to the same  model, and also finding that it means more free newspapers than planned, but there does seem to be a trend of improved advertising revenue, based in part that the free issues seem to be going to young readers, the demographic that advertisers want.

In Birmingham the plight at the Birmingham Mail has not improved in spite of a tremendous effort to focus on local news. The EveningMail knew it had to do something drastic when in both 2004 and 2005 it suffered 10% circulation falls and its circulation fell below the psychologically important 100,000. The paper’s answer -- a £1 million relaunch, and to convince its readership this was really now a different animal it went back to the name it gave up in 1967, The Birmingham Mail.

Local news that only used to appear on the inside pages became prominent on the front page. Local offices that had been shut for budget reasons were reopened. Because Birmingham, being the UK’s second largest city, has an extremely diverse population, it increased editions and editorial was focused based on geographically where that particular edition of the paper would circulate. Each edition has a minimum of five local stories.

Owner Trinity Mirror boasted in its news release at the relaunch, “The new ultra local editions are all based on geography to serve widely differing communities across greater Birmingham and the city itself. This follows extensive research among existing and potential readers, who strongly backed a community reporting approach.”

And the result? Yet another example of market research saying one thing and reality saying something else. For the last six months of 2007 circulation fell 6.9% to stand at 67,231. The only silver lining is that the rate of decrease is slowing down. – the year before the decrease was more than 17%. The dream of pushing circulation back into six figures must surely be gone forever.

So now the major effort seems to be going into the newspaper’s web site that relaunched at the end of January, and it is there that owner Trinity-Mirror now believes that its regional newspapers should concentrate. The company says it is going to hire around 100 additional staff for digital publishing projects this year, primarily in digital sales, but with some editorial.

And it says it is testing a new tool that allows on-line measurement of its readership that will eliminate readers who are cross-over, in other words it says it won’t be counting its print readers twice. No word on how they do that or how the experiment is going, but it is something to keep an eye on.