There is now only a single UK regional newspaper that sells more than 20,000 copies a day.
The largest seller in the country is the Belfast-based Irish News which shifts slightly more than the threshold.
The lack of fanfare to this news, slipped out without much comment in UK Press Gazette, is probably the most striking think to an old hack like myself.
The figures are from the UK Press Gazette [paywall].
The Express & Star, which I used to work for, sold more than 180,000 copies a day around 2005.
Rupert Murdoch’s recent prediction that there is maybe five years of profit left in newspapers is if anything optimistic. At current rates of decline there will be no copies sold.
We avoid news
Yet, we are less bothered about news. For a functioning democracy this is bad news.
More females in the UK avoid the news than actually are interested in it, according to the Reuters Digital News report. There is an eight per cent majority of men who are more interested in news than avoiding it.
We get news online
The declining print figures don’t mean the end of news but rather how we consume it.
Online news is where most news is consumer in 2025, according to the Reuters study. Almost 75 per cent turned to the web for updates.
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