Commercial staff at leading publishers have told Press Gazette they’re still set on transitioning to first-party data despite Google’s landmark decision in July not to proceed with its long-promised deprecation of third-party cookies.

Although the tech giant’s about-face caused grumbles in the news industry, executives at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference agreed the threatened death of cookies on Google‘s dominant Chrome browser provided the impetus necessary to get their houses in order on user data.

That change, they added, appears to already be reflected in increased ad sales.

‘I definitely used the word bastards’ when Google made cookie announcement, says one executive

Asked by Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford how he had reacted to Google’s July cookie announcement Morgan Stevenson, the digital transformation director at Newsquest, said: “I definitely used the word bastards.

“Simply because we put a lot of work in, preparing. I think it was a good industry kick up the arse to better prepare for leveraging our first-party data.”

But he said he felt Google had at least been “trying to create a solution to the challenge, unlike Safari and Mozilla, who just said ‘see you later, publishers’…

“I think there was a part [of me that] would have liked to just carry on with it, pull the plug, let’s see what happens. But there is so much still within the consent challenge to truly be confident that, if they pull the plug, we know what’s going to happen.”

Cookies are packets of data that give websites information about their users. If a website knows about its users it can sell ad space for higher prices, so Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies left publishers scrambling to develop strategies to get users to hand over their data directly.

Ultimately, Stevenson said, “it was a bit of reprieve, actually, just to get a bit more time with so many challenges to be ready for it if they really do pull the plug”.

Kyle Vinansky, the senior vice president of global sales at Forbes, had a similar view, saying: “I think everyone on our team really groaned when we heard that news. It was just one more thing in that saga.

“But I think what Google did, and others that were focused on this cookieless future, is they really got us thinking more about our first-party solutions, about the way that we could better understand our audiences…

“The biggest thing for us is it put focus on an issue where, ten years ago, despite our size and our scale, we didn’t know that much about our audiences. Now we know an awful lot.

“We’ve been investing more, even outside of first party data, and looking at ways with research panels and other levels of engagement that really allow us to dive into those groups that are most core to the advertising partners that are spending with us.”

Gareth Cross, the senior director for digital solutions at The Telegraph, said he had been less shocked: “To say it wasn’t the biggest surprise of the year is probably an understatement.

“I think the good thing from the Telegraph perspective was it hasn’t really affected the way we go about day to day, or our strategy, in any way. We were always doubling down on our first party data.”

Newsquest sees success with subscription model for advertisers

Despite their frustrations, the publishers said things appeared to be going in the right direction on ad sales.

Stevenson said Newsquest had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.

Although most of its concern was with its digital direct-sold advertising, he said “we’ve done significantly better this year at holding on to print revenues.

“One of the diversifications that we did six to seven years ago was to start introducing digital marketing services, as a reseller of those, to the same businesses that we sell our direct audiences to. That’s helped us become much stickier, for customers to stay with us.”

Services offered within that package included “SEO advice, PR copywriting, website building as well – so a whole one-stop shop and helping them to really navigate how they better improve the marketing of their own brand”.

He said Newsquest had “invested very heavily” in metrics like view time that help prove the value of their services to small business owners, and that they have improved client retention by rolling out a subscription model for ad sales.

“We looked at the best-performing campaigns for different industry styles and turned them into such good value you can’t afford to turn them off,” he said.

“You need to give three months’ notice if you want to turn it off, effectively… I’d say probably now 16 or 17% of our ad revenue is coming from a subscription model for advertisers.”

Nuno Brilha, the CMO of attention management platform Insurads, said they were looking into a similar ad subscription service as part of a recently-launched strategic partnership with Mather Economics and its content and analytics platform, Sophi.

Telegraph: Direct-sold advertising revenues up and ‘they will grow again this year’

Cross, from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.

He said the “beauty” of a subscription-first business was that “the things that come with that are all the things that help you face some other challenges” around advertising.

“So there’s a hell of a lot of first-party data – whether it’s declared, inferred – and the way we use it, we no longer need to rely on third-party data sources for our direct-sold.”

More broadly, he said, “we do things now that we would never have done before. A good example of that is if an ad format isn’t working, we remove it.

“Often what would have happened in the past – you [wouldn’t] lose that yield, you’d just add something else, and before you know it you’ve got something incredibly cluttered, diluted…

“One of my colleagues says the ad experiences are designed to engage, not enrage.”

Forbes ‘creates scarcity’ on sponsorship opportunities to add ‘exclusivity’ for partners

Forbes executive Vinansky also said he was pleased with the year – but sounded a note of caution.

“From an audience standpoint, I think we’re doing better than ever: almost 100 million users on a monthly basis, consistent growth from that regard,” he said.

“From a revenue standpoint we’re pacing ahead of last year, but Q4 for us is an incredibly important time of the year. We’re expecting a lot of information in the next month or so that’s really going to decide where those numbers fall on an annual basis.

“And we’re still up against a very challenging political landscape, as we all know. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty still, and it’s a question for us of whether or not our largest advertising partners are in a position where they want to be a part of those conversations, or they want to wait and they want to stay out of the market.”

Forbes has a partial paywall, but Vinansky said “the majority of our traffic” does not come through it.

“We continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”

He said that direct-sold advertising is “our largest business segment”, with ads sold via the open exchange second.

Forbes SVP of global sales responds to revelation the site had been running ads on a low-visibility subdomain

Press Gazette editor Ponsford also asked Vinansky about a story that broke in March which revealed that some ads Forbes had been paid to run had appeared not on the main site but on a subdomain that could not be accessed through regular site or search engine navigation. (Forbes has denied that it had been running a so-called “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” site.)

“I think it’s really caused us to think about transparency in a different way,” Vinansky said.

“From a data compliance standpoint, and some of the verification partners that they were using, we taught our partners how to actually identify any advertising that ran with us on that subdomain. It just wasn’t something that they were looking for.

“The primary issue that we were dealing with there… was a matter of the page templates that we were using, and them being gallery-style templates.” (The ads on the subdomain appeared while a user clicked through slideshow-format content.)

He continued: “Once we had that conversation with our partners about why these pages existed, the way that we were using them, the way that they supported some of our most deeply-reported editorial, it had a very different outcome than the article alone that really put us in a spotlight and had us on our heels in a pretty negative way.”

A specific change following the incident, he said, was that Forbes now provides “a templated lookbook of every single page design that we use on Forbes and every single place that an ad could theoretically run.

“It was nothing that we had done before. We’ve provided screenshots before after a campaign went live, but now we’re getting to granular detail as to where your ads might run before a campaign happens.

“From a reporting standpoint, we are dialed into all of the ad verification partners and have direct relationships with them ourselves. So we encourage our partners to use that data. We encourage them to use our first-party data. We encourage them to use third-party data segments that are outside of those.

“It’s the mixed approach to making sure that everyone feels the highest levels of confidence in that reporting and where the sources are coming from and being able to tell a more complete story with it.”

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Local news “does not have to be in decline”, according to UK regional press giant Newsquest as its 2023 accounts show revenue flat over two years.

The post-pandemic revenue growth of 2022 was followed by only a slight decline in 2023 (not including the impact of the acquisition of Archant in March 2022) and an increase in profitability.

Newsquest publishes some 250 brands across the UK and is second only to Reach in terms of the size of its local media news business.

Excluding Archant, Newsquest reported revenue down 1.6% to £155.5m and profit before tax, interest, deductibles and amortisation (EBIDTA) of £32.4m (up 2.6%).

When the former Archant titles are included, Newsquest reported revenue of £192m and profit (EBITDA) of £41.3m.

Newsquest has achieved a turnaround in the financial performance of formerly loss-making Archant after dramatically cutting staff costs.

Newsquest showed ‘resilience’ in face of weak UK economy

Newsquest, which is ultimately owned by US media giant Gannett, comprises three separate limited companies: Newsquest Media Group (150 news brands, 70 magazines), Newsquest Clyde and Forth Press (the publisher’s Scottish weekly newspaper business, not including the likes of the daily Glasgow Herald and Times) and Newsquest Community Media (which includes the four daily and 50 weekly local newspaper titles that formerly comprised Archant).

Writing in the main Newsquest Media Group accounts, finance director Paul Hunter said the improved profitability in 2023, against a backdrop of weak economic growth in the UK, showed "considerable resilience".

He added: "We are particularly pleased with the ongoing stability in Newsquest’s revenues, which excluding acquisitions (so on a like for like basis) have been broadly flat for the last two years, a period where the wider news publishing industry has generally been experiencing significant revenue declines.

"This revenue stability helps support our view that local news publishing does not have to be in decline – indeed our view is that, although the industry employs many fewer people than it used to in the print dominated era, and there are still risks and challenges, the local news sector is very much alive and kicking."

Press Gazette research from earlier this year revealed that the UK's big three local news publishers are now around a quarter of the size they were in 2007 in terms of revenue and staff.

Getting to this stable position has required "a lot of innovation", said Hunter, particularly in digital which he said now accounts for 50% of advertising revenue.

Speaking at a Press Gazette event in November, Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker said much of the company's success was down to the focus on having local sales people who offer to help local businesses with advertising on Facebook and Google as well as on Newsquest's own print and digital brands.

He said: “We’ve tried to diversify away from being a pure publisher to being a digital marketing agency and that’s been pretty successful.”

Newsquest has also added significant digital reader revenue, reaching 100,000 online subscribers earlier this month which together now contribute more than £6m in annual revenue.

Deep local engagement (rather than scale) is focus

Newsquest claims to reach more than 40 million digital users per month via its websites. But finance director Hunter said the company's core focus is on reaching an audience in the areas each title services - citing the examples of York, Worcester and Wrexham where Newsquest websites reach three-quarters of the local population every month online.

Hunter also said that the best way for the government to help the local news industry is by spending money with it. He said local newsbrands reach 77% of the UK population and only account for 2.2% of government ad spend.

Archant goes from loss to huge profit (but with far fewer staff)

The accounts reveal the extent of the challenge at Archant, previously the UK's fourth largest regional newspaper group, which was bought by Newsquest in March 2022.

The Eastern Daily Press publisher struggled during the Covid-19 pandemic and was bought by private equity firm Rcapital Partners in August 2020 in a Company Voluntary Arrangement deal which left shareholders with nothing.

Archant went from turnover of £43m in 2022 to £36.4m in its first full year of Newsquest ownership. But it went from a pre-tax loss of £8m to a pre-tax profit of £5.6m. Archant's EBITDA profit figure increased nine-fold to nearly £9m.

This was mainly achieved by slashing wages and salary costs from £21.7m to £11m. The average number of employees fell from 670 to 290.

Part of the reduction in staff and turnover is due to the fact the 2022 accounts include a number of specialist magazine titles which were sold off early in the year. Press Gazette understands that a number of loss-making sections of the former Archant business were also closed by Newsquest in the year.

The accounts for the Archant business state that its decline in revenue was "reflective of the disruption required to refocus" the business, its technology and its working practices.

"These changes have transformed the profitability and viability of the company going forward," they stated.

NUJ says staff should be rewarded, not just top directors

Total remuneration for the best-paid director at Newsquest Media Group increased to £976,695 in 2023 versus £640,390 in 2022. This pay will have included a performance-related element.

Following publication of the Newsquest accounts, NUJ national coordinator Chris Morley said: "For the two UK executive directors to between them enjoy not only a bankable 14.5% total increase in their salaries – an injection last year of £89,000 to their base pay – but a whopping 74% boost in ‘performance related payments’ to almost £700,000.

“If their performance was that good, we believe that journalists, who are key to generating the group revenue, should be far better rewarded. Instead this year, where offers have been made to our members, they have often been months after the annual pay anniversary and typically only around 3%. In the case of Local Democracy Reporters, Newsquest only passed on the 1.5% uplift in funding from the BBC, although it did at least establish a better minimum salary which additionally benefitted a few...

"The business’s finances are even more positive following the payment in January of a £5m scheduled final deficit payment into the old final salary pension scheme. The accounts make clear that a further payment in 2025 will not be necessary as the old scheme is now fully funded. This gives the company much more financial flexibility which we say should lead to long overdue investments in the staff.”

The Newsquest NUJ Group Chapel said in a statement: "We know from comparisons with colleagues in other news publishers that Newsquest pay is not competitive, and we are calling on senior management to reverse this trend and instead make the company a magnet for top journalistic talent.”

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Newsquest has reached 100,000 paid digital subscribers four years after first launching a soft paywall across most of its biggest regional news websites.

The publisher of titles including the Brighton Argus, South Wales Argus, Oxford Mail and Eastern Daily Press said it recorded 101,109 paying digital subscribers last week.

Newsquest said it simultaneously reached a record total 187 million page views in August, up 13% year on year.

Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker said: “The demand for digital subscriptions, which has now surpassed 100,000 and continues to grow at a pace, has exceeded our expectations.

“At the same time, we’re also continuing to grow our overall digital audience, with 57.5 million visitors to the Newsquest sites in August reading a record number of articles.

“The data further underlines the phenomenal demand for trusted local news and the power of our local platforms which now typically reach more than 75% of local people each month.”

Newsquest rolled out metered paywalls for the websites of all of its daily newspapers in 2020 after trying the strategy out first on sites including the Northern Echo and The Herald.

Currently visitors to most of its websites can read up to 30 articles per month without paying, although some stories are for subscribers only. Digital subscriptions, which typically cost £4.99 per month, give full access to the website, fewer ads and access to an e-edition of the print newspaper. Some of the biggest websites also provide subscriber-only newsletters.

In November last year Faure Walker told Press Gazette that Newsquest was on 78,000 paying online subscribers, meaning it has grown the total by 30% in nine months.

Newsquest said digital subscriptions now bring in more than £500,000 per month.

Faure Walker said in November: “I don’t think it’s going to be the main revenue stream for us… but it’s an important part of the mix.”

The new milestone means Newsquest is eligible to join the next update of Press Gazette’s 100k Club of English-speaking news publishers with at least 100,000 digital subscribers. Its parent company Gannett is already represented, with two million digital-only subscriptions.

Overall Newsquest said its overall online traffic in 2024 so far, between January and August, is up 9% year-on-year after a year of 12.5% like-for-like growth in 2023.

Press Gazette analysis of Ipsos iris data for July suggested Newsquest was the best-performing big-three UK regional publisher that month with average monthly audience growth of 60% and audience minutes up 44% on average across the sites for which we received data.

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Press Gazette’s updated ranking of the biggest local news websites in the UK shows that most titles grew their audience in July 2024 versus the same month a year earlier.

When Press Gazette last ranked UK local news websites using Ipsos iris data just under a year ago, we found most titles were losing traffic year on year. Many local news websites have felt the impact of declining Facebook referral traffic and changes to Google’s search algorithm.

But looking at the 78 local news websites that made it into the top 2,100 UK websites list shared by Ipsos iris for July, 57 titles grew their monthly UK audience year on year last month.

On average, the 78 sites grew their monthly UK audience by 33% and grew their total monthly audience minutes by 12%.

This compares with an average rate of print circulation decline of 17% in the first half of 2024 for the 53 daily UK titles audited by ABC.

The Manchester Evening News is the largest local news website in the UK with a monthly audience of over 12 million (up 9% year on year). Its daily print circulation is 6,519 (down 22% year on year).

Nine out of the ten most popular regional press websites in the UK are published by Reach (with the third-placed Evening Standard the only exception).

The top UK local news websites have audiences multiple times bigger than the populations of the areas they cover, with many attracting readers nationally and even internationally – sometimes helped by coverage of massive football teams.

Overall 34 out of the UK's top 78 regional sites are published by Reach, with 18 published by Newsquest and a further 18 published by National World.

The only other publishers to feature in the top 78 local news websites which Ipsos iris releases data for are Iliffe Media (two titles), DC Thomson (two), City AM and Evening Standard Ltd.

Some 44 local news sites audited by Ipsos iris grew their monthly audience by more than 10% year on year.

Reach-owned Gloucestershire Live was the best-performing site, growing its monthly audience by 302% to just over four million year on year and total audience minutes by 20% to 5.5 million.

Six out of the ten fastest-growing sites were published by Newsquest: The Daily Echo in Southampton, Oxford Mail, Bournemouth Echo, Brighton Argus, Dorset Echo and Glasgow Times.

However 16 local news websites in our top-78 list lost more than 10% of their monthly audience year on year.

Seven out of the ten local news websites audited by Ipsos iris which fell fastest were published by Reach.

Newsquest's Northern Echo was the fastest faller, down 56% year on year in terms of monthly audience. But it saw a slight increase in total audience minutes by 4% to 2.9 million per month suggesting it has one of the most deeply engaged audiences among all the leading UK local news websites.

Newsquest was best performer out of big three UK regional press publishers

Despite dominating the sector in terms of overall audience, in relative terms Reach was the worst performing out of the big three UK regional news publishers.

Reach reported an average year-on-year decline in monthly audience minutes of 45% despite average growth of 13% in total monthly audience at its sites, suggesting a fall in engagement across the board for its brands in July 2024.

Newsquest was the best-performing big-three publisher with average monthly audience growth of 60% and audience minutes up 44% on average across the sites we have data for.

National World saw average audience growth of just over 9% with minutes up 42% on average.

Methodology

Ipsos iris data is partly derived from a panel of 10,000 people aged 15 and over that is designed to be nationally representative. The participants have meters installed across 25,000 personal devices to passively measure website and app usage.

This data is combined with data from participating websites that are tagged so all devices visiting the site can be identified and logged.

Publishers often have their own internal audience metrics, which can result in different figures. Press Gazette uses Ipsos for its UK news audience ranking stories to be able to compare across publishers.

For this story, 78 local news websites were isolated by Press Gazette from a list shared by Ipsos iris of the top 2,100 online brands in the UK in July 2024.

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Twenty-two print local newspapers have closed in the UK in the past two years.

Press Gazette’s latest research suggests at least 293 local newspapers have closed since 2005.

Four titles were launched in print between the end of July 2022 and the start of August 2024.

The outlook was better for local digital outlets, however, with 20 launches outweighing 15 closures over the past two years (with one title appearing in both lists).

Press Gazette has compiled a list of local launches and closures since our last update in July 2022, based on reports of launches and closures across Press Gazette and Hold The Front Page. Editions of newspapers have been treated as separate titles.

The closure of titles only tells part of the story as many titles continue but with tiny staffs. Separate Press Gazette research has found that the UK’s three leading local newspaper publishers Newsquest, Reach and National World (which publish the vast majority of titles) employ around 3,000 journalists today compared with 9,000 in 2007.

Eight print titles closed in August 2022 alone as National World, Reach, and the smaller Champion Media Group all made cutbacks – coming days after the closure of five titles by Newsquest which made it into our last update.

Reach ended the free Manchester Weekly News, which had editions covering Trafford and Salford, and said at the time it no longer needed to “flood” the city with print to guarantee advertisers had a wide reach as this role is now fulfilled online instead.

The second-biggest spate of closures in the past two years came in January 2023, with six papers ending their runs – five owned by Highland News & Media, with some merged and the coverage of others moved to Grampian Online, and one by Tindle Newspapers.

One of the Highland titles to close was the Turriff Advertiser, a weekly title founded in 1933 to cover a town in Aberdeenshire. It was affectionately known as The Squeak.

Turiff becomes town without a local newspaper voice

Turiff, a town of around 5,000, now is only covered by Grampian Online.

David Porter, who edited the Turriff Advertiser before its closure, told Press Gazette that since the title ceased printing, “they don’t look to cover the area unless it’s something big.”

Porter said the same applies to the other areas where Highland closed titles, explaining: “The Inverurie Advertiser had the same situation, the Ellon Advertiser had the same situation. Ellon and Inverurie still nominally have a print title after the Inverurie Herald and the Ellon Times integrated into a single title. It does still get produced, but it has no local reporters, and it’s literally done by a guy sitting in The Scotsman’s office in Edinburgh; there’s no input locally.”

Regarding the move to an online model, Porter said: “They tried it with us and it didn’t work, because rural Aberdeenshire, like most of Scotland, has an ageing population. There are a lot of people who come up from down south in England to settle. So we have a much older age base here, and they are print readers.”

Porter believes that the lack of established local media outlets will be damaging for any future attempt to revive the art of local reporting. He said: “There isn’t even an opening for people for people who want work experience, there are no positions for them. That route has just gone.

“If you would get a classroom of journalism students, they all want to write on sport. They don’t want to write on local news. Nobody writes about farming, there’s probably only five of us left in the whole of Scotland.”

Local councillor Alastair Forsyth told Press Gazette that, since the closure: “I regularly get complaints from constituents that they’re not aware of the things going on right under their noses, simply because there is no public discourse for that information to be distributed.”

Forsyth believes this has driven people to sites such as Facebook, which has a page called My Turriff, to find local news. While this can help to fill the void, he sees it as less reliable, arguing that “the advantage of the press is that they have methods and systems that authenticate the veracity of news media”.

Newsquest Scotland also shut down two titles in May 2023. According to Hold The Front Page, a spokesperson said: “Closing our print editions will allow us to focus our resource more on what our audience is telling us they want – breaking news, multimedia content and engaging newsletters while retaining a strong presence in our communities.” Those two titles – the Dumbarton and Vale of Leven Reporter and the Irvine Times – continued to publish online and no jobs were lost.

UK local newspaper launches in print since August 2022

Four print titles were launched in the same period, exclusively by independent or smaller publishers, making it a net loss in print of 18 local newspapers.

Of the launches, one was weekly, two were fortnightly and one was monthly.

UK local news closures and launches in digital since August 2022

Reach's closure of 13 Live regional websites at the end of 2023 dominated digital closures in the period. All but two of the closures were in areas traditionally served by Reach's rivals Newsquest and National World.

The closures took place as part of a restructure that saw Reach cut 450 jobs.

Meanwhile Newsquest closed down The National Wales, its news website for the whole nation, in August 2022 after failing to grow its subscriber numbers to a sufficient level. It had been launched 18 months earlier.

And The QT, a subscriber-based website for the North East launched by a former Newcastle Journal editor, ceased publication in July this year just months after its launch.

However 19 other launches also took place, meaning they outweighed the effect of the closures.

Seven of those were part of an expansion of The Lead, a self-proclaimed "micro-mag" that "aim[s] to cover the sharp angles that define our life in the UK today", in the North West of England.

National World launched two local titles in the form of Nottingham World and Derby World. Leicester World was said to be planned to follow soon afterwards last year but it still does not appear to be live.

A number of titles launched via Substack in the form of newsletters of various frequency. Newsquest backed the launch of the Glasgow Wrap under editor Marissa MacWhirter in March 2024, advised by Michael MacLeod who launched his own editions for Edinburgh and London. All three are curation-based rather than primarily doing original reporting.

Also on Substack Mill Media, which has been praised for its other previous launches since 2020 starting with the Manchester Mill, went live with the Birmingham Dispatch in November 2023 while an independent group of journalists started investigative journalism-based The London Spy in May this year.

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The Welsh Parliament (Senedd) has voted against a proposal to stop requiring local authorities to publish council tax notices in print newspapers.

The result prompted relief from many of the largest newspaper publications in Wales but consternation at smaller independent titles.

The proposal would itself have had a relatively minor effect on local newspaper incomes, but major publishers warned it could be a first step toward closing a revenue stream that keeps several Welsh newspapers alive.

Newsquest says six of its ten Welsh papers would be loss-making without public notices

The main purpose of the Local Government Finance (Wales) Bill was to add a requirement for the Welsh government to carry out council tax revaluations every five years.

However, as originally proposed by the Welsh Labour government, the bill also carried a clause that swapped the existing requirement for councils to publish tax changes in local newspapers to one that meant they would put them on their websites.

On Monday six of the largest newspapers in Wales published front pages calling on the Senedd to “save Welsh news” and to “stop this attack on our industry”.

The proposal was also criticised by the News Media Association, the Society of Editors and the National Union of Journalists.

On Tuesday Conservatives in the Senedd tabled an amendment to scrap the clause, which passed with the support of Plaid Cymru Members of the Senedd after Welsh Labour opted to abstain on the vote.

Across the UK, public notices, which can also include notices about planning and transport, are a major revenue stream for regional newspapers and have become more significant as subscription and commercial advertising incomes have dwindled.

Trade body the News Media Association estimated last year that public notices generate £40m for publishers a year, and in January Gavin Thompson, Newsquest’s regional editor for Wales, told the Senedd’s Local Government and Housing Committee that without public notice revenue “six out of our ten local newspapers would have been loss making last year…

“Local journalism better informs communities – on democratic issues, but also just in terms of promoting wider community cohesion. And if we look at our situation in Newsquest, if we removed six print newspapers because they were no longer making money, then those communities would be worse off for it.”

The Welsh Local Government Association has estimated local authorities spend around £33,000 a year putting tax notices in local papers in Wales, but Thompson told the committee that Newsquest feared dropping them would be “the thin end of the wedge” towards ending other types of public notices.

Hyperlocal argues Welsh government has ‘caved into desperate pleas from the big legacy media companies’

Some publishers did support the measure, however. Mytown Media, which publishes Mywelshpool.co.uk and Mynewtown.co.uk, wrote after the clause was voted down that the Welsh government had “caved into desperate pleas from the big legacy media companies”.

The publisher said: “Mywelshpool and Mynewtown, along with other widely read independent news companies in Wales, were supporting moves to support Powys County Council and other local authorities in not having to spend millions of our pounds in printing public notices in newspapers that have seen their readership decimated in the past 20 years…

“We have lobbied for 15 years for this out-of-date legislation to be scrapped so that serious media organisations, like Mywelshpool, can be considered as a better value-for-money alternative to publicising notices.”

Rob Taylor, who runs independent hyperlocal Wrexham.com, made a similar argument to the Senedd Local Government and Housing Committee when he appeared alongside Newsquest’s Thompson in January.

Referring to Thompson’s point about how many Newsquest papers would be loss-making without the notices, Taylor said: “An old law has become a subsidy. It may not be a direct subsidy, but it’s an indirect subsidy, and it’s not providing value for taxpayers anymore.”

It is not the first time that digital-only publishers in the UK, who are ineligible to publish statutory notices, have criticised the current public notices regime. Daniel Ionescu, editor of The Lincolnite, told Hold the Front Page in 2017 that “legislation should be amended to reflect the modern landscape in which councils would be allowed to put them in digital publications as well or their own website should they wish to.

“It’s millions of pounds that is basically a government subsidy to papers across the country.”

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Three-quarters of the UK’s biggest media organisations increased the percentage of women in their top teams in the past year.

Of 34 media organisations big enough to be required to report gender pay data to the Government, 26 (or 76%) increased the proportion of women in their top pay quarter between 2022 and 2023.

As of the latest snapshot date of 5 April 2023, there were more men than women within the top 25% paid employees at 79% of the companies in our analysis. This is down from 91% a year earlier.

Bloomberg (21.7% women), Sun publisher News Group Newspapers (27.5%) and Mirror Group Newspapers (28%) are at the bottom of the table for percentage of women in their top pay band.

It should be noted that the figures cover whole companies, which for some such as Bloomberg and Sky UK will mean a majority of roles are not journalism related.

Two publishers have 50/50 balance in their top teams: Scottish broadcaster STV Television and Newsquest Community Media, the arm of Newsquest that used to be Archant before its 2022 acquisition.

Five publishers have a majority of women in their top quartiles, led by Hearst on 66% and followed by Conde Nast on 58.9% and Haymarket on 53%.

Which? saw the biggest jump, from 27% representation in 2022 to 51% last year. William Reed was up from 39% to 47% while The Independent went from 33.33% to 39.1%.

Despite most having fewer women than men in their top pay quarter, 82% have more women than men in their lowest-paid group.

The exceptions are Which? (24% women in bottom quarter), Newsquest (28%), Press Association (35.8%), Sky UK (46%), Mirror Group Newspapers (48%) and Bloomberg (49%).

This imbalance suggests more women's careers stall after they have children, or there are other reasons they miss out on promotions.

Average UK media gender pay gap now 11%

This is likely to play a large part in the gender pay gap of the industry, which is now at 11% across the 34 publishers ranked by their data for 5 April 2023.

This means that women are on average paid 11% less than men.

This is a marginal improvement from last year when the average was 12%.

The gender pay gap is not about equal pay and whether men and women are paid the same to do the same jobs, but rather can indicate men dominating in higher-paid roles.

Note: Figures for GB News in 2022 are included in our charts but not in our analysis - the broadcaster was late reporting its figures last year so got missed out of our last set of charts, and it has missed the deadline again this year.

The biggest median gender pay gaps are at Bloomberg (23%) and The Independent (22%). Just behind on 19% are Mail publisher Associated Newspapers, Reuters, Sun publisher News Group Newspapers and Conde Nast.

The smallest pay gap was of 5% at both the Press Association (which last year reported equal pay) and Haymarket. Meanwhile Newsquest paid women 68% more on average - the only publisher to skew towards women.

The average median gender pay gap has decreased from 15.7% in 2017. However some individual publishers have seen their pay gaps increase - for example Mail publisher Associated Newspapers (from 15% in 2017 to 19% in 2023), Hearst (from 17% to 18%) and Sky UK (from 8% to 12%)

Some of the publishers seeing the biggest positive change since 2017 have been The Economist (down from 30% to 16%), Telegraph Media Group (from 23% to 11%), Global (from 21% to 11%) and STV (from 17% to 9%).

The Telegraph said in its pay report: "While our gender pay gap has narrowed significantly over the last few years, and noticeably in relation to others across the industry, we know there is still work to do. We remain committed to reducing our pay gap year on year whilst continuing to attract and retain female talent."

We prioritise the median pay gap in our analysis as organisations such as Scottish charity Close the Gap have said the median is "considered to be a more accurate measure as it is not skewed by very low hourly pay or very high hourly pay".

However we also include the mean in our charts because, as Close the Gap added, "we know the very high-paid people tend to be men, and the very low-paid people tend to be women, and the mean paints an important picture of the pay gap because it reflects this issue".

The biggest mean gender pay gap in 2023 was at Conde Nast (27%) followed by The Independent (23%). The smallest mean gender pay gap was at Newsquest (2%) while two had mean pay gaps favouring women: Reach's local arm Local World (women paid 2% more) and CNN (women paid 9% more).

UK media bonus gender pay gaps

Looking at bonuses, men received more bonus pay than women at almost two-thirds (65%) of companies.

The biggest bonus gaps favouring men were at CNN (men receiving 59% more), Bloomberg (56%) and Reuters (53%).

Seven publishers reported equal bonus pay for men and women when looking at the median: Hearst, ITN, BBC, Times Media, News Group Newspapers, Telegraph Media Group and Future.

The biggest negative bonus gaps, meaning women received more, were at Local World (53%) and Newsquest (42%).

Note: The Press Gazette analysis uses the figures for Reach subsidiaries Mirror Group Newspapers and Local World. The full Reach plc figures were added to our tables after publication.

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UK regional daily print newspaper circulations fell by an average of 19% year-on-year in the second half of 2023 according to the latest ABC figures.

The 401 non-dailies audited by ABC meanwhile saw their January to December circulations decline by an average of 16% compared to 2022, according to Press Gazette’s analysis.

The figures take into account paid print copies, paid print subscriptions and, where relevant, free copies and digital editions. The small number of digital subscriptions reported are also included as per the ABC headline figures.

No daily titles bucked the trend of year-on-year decline in circulation in the last six months of 2023.

Top of the list in terms of circulation perforamance was the Irish News (average circulation of 23,615) which reported the smallest decline at 7%, making it again the only one of the 54 daily titles audited by ABC that saw a fall of less than 10%.

National World’s The Scotsman (circulation of 7,710), Newsquest’s Dorset Echo (4,871) and Bolton News (3,797) and DC Thomson's Aberdeen Evening Express (9,449) were all down 12% year-on-year.

At the other end of the table was Reach’s the Manchester Evening News, hardest hit among the dailies for a second year in a row. Print sales were 38% down year-on-year as average circulation fell to 7,315. Reach made the decision to end free copies of the newspaper in August 2022 so this is still impacting the comparative figures.

Eight of the ten titles with the biggest year-on-year falls were owned by Reach, whose daily titles included in the ABC data saw a combined average decline of 25%.

The Hull Daily Mail (average circulation of 5,763, down 31%), Coventry Telegraph (3,213, down 28%) and Teesside Gazette (4,877, down 27%) were among the Reach titles that saw circulation drops of over a quarter. Print nevertheless still makes up 75% of revenues of Reach, which also publishes a number of the UK's best known national newsbrands including the Mirror, with digital on 25%.

Reach has increased print cover prices to offset declining online advertising revenue over the last year.

At a publisher level Newsquest fared best among those with at least five titles reporting to ABC for 2023, although it still reported a combined decline of 16% across its 22 titles included in the data.

The Irish News has taken the top spot by readership from 2022’s most-widely circulated print daily, Aberdeen Press & Journal (22,927) which is now in second.

DC Thomson-owned The Courier was third with an average circulation of 17,647. DC Thomson is one of a small group of local publishers that have also made some headway with digital subscriptions.

Among non-dailies, Newsquest’s Hunts Post saw the sharpest fall of 51% from 21,791 to 10,754, reflecting a smaller print run since the title is distributed free of charge.

It was among 22 non-daily titles to see circulation drops of over one third. Of the 401 non-daily titles in the data, 64 are free - of which all but 12 saw circulation drop as fewer copies were printed.

London free paper Hackney Gazette, published by Newsquest (formerly Archant), almost tripled its average circulation which was up 172% year-on-year from 1,347 to 3,668.

A further five free Newsquest titles covering London, including Islington Gazette (average circulation of 4,887), Docklands & East London Advertiser (4,963), Newham Recorder (7,729), Ilford Recorder (5,749) and Ham and High Express (5,909) also saw circulation rises of at least 10%.

Paid non-dailies fared worse with only Aberdeen title Ellon Times seeing its circulation rise (up by 35%) although its average distribution per edition is just 138.

Online audience growth

Online audience data from Ipsos iris suggests that while print readership is falling, some brands are seeing growth in their online audiences.

Of the top 50 UK regional digital brands according to Ipsos iris data for January 2024, 19 saw an increase in audience size.

Bristol Live (5.3 million, up 180% compared to January 2023), Gloucestershire Live (2.8 million, up 127%), Worcester News (973,629, up 115%) and Oxford Mail (1.2 million, up 106%) all more than doubled their online reach.

Birmingham Live (11.2 million people) and Manchester Evening News (11 million) meanwhile saw large audiences of almost a quarter of the UK online population.

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Bosses at Reach and Newsquest have responded to a claim from the founder of the Manchester Mill newsletter start-up that quality “obviously hasn’t” been maintained in UK local media.

However Reach chief digital publisher David Higgerson and Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker left Lords Communications and Digital Committee chair Baroness Tina Stowell “a bit baffled by the picture that you’re painting about the success of your businesses, when the challenge seems to be around the quality of content”.

Joshi Herrmann, who founded the Manchester Mill on newsletter platform Substack in 2020 and has since expanded into Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham, told the committee, which is examining the future of news, on Tuesday: “I think the larger question of how has quality been maintained in local media generally is that it obviously hasn’t.

“In the local town near where my mum lives in Sussex, there used to be two local newspapers, both of which had an office on the high street… Now, there is one newspaper and it doesn’t have any local coverage to speak of. There might be one story about the local town. The rest of it will be aggregated from other local communities where the same large news organisation owns other titles.

“It is effectively a zombie newspaper. It says it is about one town, but in fact it is just got content and stories from all over the country and from all over the county. So quality hasn’t been maintained. If you go on the websites of local newspapers, you will find all sorts of stories that are not journalism and they’re not local, and you’ll find so many ads covering that content that it’s very difficult to read.”

Reach: ‘We do a lot of journalism nobody else does’

Reach content chief Higgerson told the committee he has worked in local journalism for 25 years and “there has been one constant in the fact that there has always been a sizeable proportion of the public who have been ready to dismiss what we do”.

“But I would point out that we do an awful lot of journalism which, frankly, nobody else does.”

Citing three examples in markets that have been entered by Mill Media, Higgerson continued: “If you look, for example, in Manchester at the success of the MEN uncovering the scandal of Awaab Ishak’s housing in Rochdale, that story only gained the traction that it did because of weeks of spadework by the Manchester Evening News and the fact the initial story was read by 150,000 people.

“You look in Liverpool, the tireless work that [political editor] Liam Thorp did to uncover the councillors who were taking an interesting approach to their parking tickets… or indeed the fact that Birmingham Live, previously, Birmingham Mail, continues to campaign for the victims of Birmingham pub bombings. All of that is made possible by doing a very broad mix of content.

“It’s very easy to pick sort of slivers of content on websites and say that’s not local news, or that’s not quality journalism, but pick up any local newspaper from the 80s or the 90s and you’ll see the same broad mix of content in those metro dailies, as you see on our websites today.”

Newsquest CEO: ‘I’m optimistic about the next five years’

Newsquest‘s Faure Walker said he was “more optimistic about the next five years than the previous ten or 15. I think we’ll see a bit more stability, although I think it will continue to be challenging”.

Citing the loss of classified advertising and a hefty chunk of display advertising to Google and Facebook, the CEO said: “But you can’t lose that revenue twice… we’re now down to a more stable core of advertising.” Half of Newsquest’s advertising revenue now comes from digital and it also has a growing digital subscriptions business.

Faure Walker said Newsquest’s revenues were up 3% in 2022, down 3% last year and “pretty flat” so far in 2024 saying that is stable over the past two and a bit years.

“I am confident and I’ve worked in the industry for a long time. I’m more confident than I ever have been in the last 22 years about the prospects for publishers, whether that’s Joshi’s business, or my business or another start-up business in large population markets,” he said.

Faure Walker also noted that although Newsquest has had to “lay off a significant amount of staff, particularly in editorial over the past ten years” they have not made “any meaningful editorial reductions over the last three years”.

[Read more: Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker on bucking the trend of regional press decline]

However, he acknowledged: “To be clear I don’t think we’re saying that it’s all roses. I think it’s still challenging, but I think we’re saying there’s more stability than perhaps the public narrative. I think the industry does a poor job of communicating. So I think there are a lot of detractors. It’s easy to throw stones at the industry. But there is a lot of good work going on.”

He cited, for example, Newsquest’s growing loyal audience – now its key metric over page views.

“So the public, the consumers of local news, yes, they may be irritated from time to time with the advertising, they might not like always what we do, but they are coming increasingly back to our sites and the audiences are very, very phenomenal.”

For example, in York about 75% of the adult population visits the York Press website each month, he said, and about 20% of the population comes back more than 15 times a month.

But it will be “more challenging going forward in smaller and medium-sized markets” than larger cities, Faure Walker added. “So I’m more relaxed about the outlook for larger cities and journalism there given the scale of markets.”

He also said: “…in terms of maintaining the quality, I would say that we are doing so.”

‘No hostility’ between MEN and Manchester Mill bosses

Despite his criticism, Herrmann said he had “no hostility” towards his fellow panellists.

Told by a peer on the committee that he “looked extremely annoyed” by answers given by his “rivals” Higgerson and Faure Walker, Herrmann said: “I wasn’t annoyed and we’re not rivals. We’re all trying to create good quality local journalism in an environment that’s very difficult. There’s no hostility whatsoever.

“I think that an important aspect of this is reality though – being honest about the situation that we’re in… there’s no point pretending that it’s in good shape because it’s in terrible shape. It’s in the worst shape it’s ever been since the advent of newspapers.

“So I don’t think there’s any hostility here. I think there’s a difference in how we’re portraying what’s going on.”

Quoting Press Gazette research he said: “I think 6,000 fewer local journalists down from 9,000 in 2007 is a remarkable drop off in capacity. And I think it should signal alarm bells definitely across Westminster that we have got this incredibly important industry that is dying and I’m sceptical about any attempt to pretend that’s not happening because we can see this happening.”

[Read more: Colossal decline of UK regional media since 2007 revealed]

Similarly, Higgerson said: “When he [Herrmann] first launched the Manchester Mill the journalists at the Manchester Evening News were pleased to see more journalism in Manchester. I don’t think either myself or Henry have set out to say everything’s rosy nor do I shirk away from the fact that we have had to reduce the size of our newsrooms, exit some markets over recent years.

“Our starting point is the same as anybody else on the panel which is we want to employ as many local journalists as possible and that’s why as we came out of the pandemic, we thought things would be better than they would be which is why we hired 200 more and we have expanded multiple times over the last decade into into new areas.”

In July 2021 Reach said it employed more journalists than it did pre-Covid in 2019 and that by the end of the year it would employ more than at any point in the previous decade. But since then it has had to make hundreds of job cuts, with more than 700 roles cut last year.

Both Higgerson and Faure Walker rejected a peer’s suggestion that their companies were “the lame ducks of the communications revolution”.

Higgerson said: “I think we’d be a lame duck if people weren’t reading what we were writing and we’re read by record numbers of people now… I definitely wouldn’t say that we’re, a lame duck and definitely wouldn’t say that we ignore what’s happened over the last 20 years.

“I think probably it’s the fact that we look at what happened over the last 20 years so much that makes us so determined to keep changing so that we can get to a place where we are hiring more journalists to have more people on the ground.”

Local news bosses address ‘ad clutter’

Higgerson and Faure Walker also addressed the “ad clutter” that can lead to complaints of poor usability and readability on the major regional news websites.

Higgerson said this issue was why Reach has begun offering paid-for ad-free experiences at some of its titles including the apps for the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo.

He said Reach hears complaints about usability “regularly” but “those are the ads that fund the journalism” and “we think it’s very important that the news is, free, or more important, freely available”.

In a lot of the towns and cities served by Reach, he said, “People are choosing between whether they can afford to heat their homes or eat the food. The idea of debating whether they pay for a news subscription is largely academic to them”.

And Faure Walker said: “We’ve obviously got to monetise the content so we have to serve advertising. There is a lot of discussion going certainly in my business at how we can improve user experience. We’ve moved quite significantly to digital subscriptions to do that.

“And similar to David, and I think other publishers are following suit, the choice I think will increasingly become you can read our content for free, but you have to put up with quite a lot of advertising clutter, but we’ve got to pay our journalists. But if you would like an ad-light or an ad-free environment, then you need to take a digital subscription for £5 a month.

“So I think the industry is moving in that direction but it certainly hasn’t got it right in terms of user experience as we stand today.”

The post Newsquest and Reach bosses respond to questions over local news quality appeared first on Press Gazette.

New research from Press Gazette has revealed the colossal extent of regional news media revenue decline in the UK since 2007.

In revenue terms the sector was about a quarter of the size in 2022 than it was in 2007, according to our analysis. When figures are adjusted for inflation the sector is around seven times smaller today than it was on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis.

Press Gazette looked at the UK’s three leading local news publishers: Reach, National World and Newsquest. Together these three giants dominate UK local news in print and online.

In 2022 the three companies had regional media revenue of around £590m and employed up to around 3,000 journalists (the figure for Reach is an estimate assuming just over half its 2,862 editorial staff worked on local titles). It should be noted that the current staff total is probably lower as major cutbacks were made across the industry in 2023.

We compared the 2022 figures with the total revenue and employment numbers for the nine companies in 2007 which would later be consolidated into Reach, National World and Newsquest.

The number of journalists employed by the nine companies totalled around 9,000 in 2007 and their collective revenue was £2.4bn

Midlands News Association, which was acquired by National World in late 2023, is not included in this analysis but its figures bear out the general trend.

In 2007 it employed around 250 journalists mainly covering Wolverhampton and Shropshire and the business turned over £67m. By 2022 turnover had dropped to £17m and according to Press Gazette estimates it employed around 50 journalists (assuming just over a quarter of its 226 staff were involved in editorial).

Where exact figures were available we have used them but in some cases we have estimated the number of journalists based on industry norms for the proportion of total headcount working in editorial.

Reach no longer breaks down its revenue by nationals and regionals so we have assumed that local media comprises 50% of revenue as this was the case in 2007 when it was called Trinity Mirror. Since then it has expanded both its national and regional media businesses extensively.

In the mid-2000s, then local press trade body the Newspaper Society reckoned local newspapers employed around 13,000 journalists. Our analysis suggests that figure is now likely around the 4,000 mark.

The decline of the UK regional press has been inversely proportional to the rise of US tech giants operating in the UK media market.

In 2007 news media advertising – magazines and newspapers combined – was worth £7.1bn in the UK, or 39% of the £17bn total UK ad spend (about £11bn in today’s money).

In 2022, all national, regional and magazine titles combined made around £2bn in advertising (print and online) out of the total £35bn UK ad spend - less than a fifth of what they were making in 2007. They’ve gone from taking 39% to a 6% slice of the pie.

By comparison, last year around £15bn of UK ad spend was spent with two US tech companies alone – Alphabet, which owns Google and Youtube, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

While Facebook and Google have provided preferable solution to small and medium business advertisers, the likes of Rightmove, Indeed and Autotrader have taken the classified advertising which once underpinned most local news media revenue.

Note: Newsquest Media Group did not publish consolidated company accounts in 2007 so we have added up the editorial headcount and turnover of its main subsidiaries as per the table below to arrive at its 2007 total.

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