Long term trend of print? It's unprintable.

Newspaper groups were given another reminder – as if they needed it – of the plight of the regional press last week with the publication of six-monthly circulation figures that showed a near-universal decline in sales.
Across the UK, local papers recorded heavy sales falls as the
long-term trend away from print readership continued. All of this, of course, has a further deflationary effect on advertising revenues, already under severe pressure as classified advertising migrates to the internet.
The pain was shared by morning and evening titles and between the different groups that own the country's regional papers. According to the ABC figures, Trinity Mirror's Liverpool Echo fell through the 90,000 barrier to sell a daily average of 88,519 copies, down 9.5% year on year, while Johnston Press's Yorkshire Post slipped 5.7% on 2008 to average 43,095 in the second half of 2009 – just two of the famous provincial titles caught up in the downturn.
"There's no sense that things are slowing down and I wouldn't expect it to show that," says Douglas McCabe, an analyst at Enders Analysis. "The trend is very much circulation decline at a pace that accelerated in the early years of the last decade, as fewer and fewer people relied on a daily local paper. That market just started to fall away quite rapidly."
"In big cities like Glasgow, there's not the same need for a local paper, whereas it's still there in the further away places where there's more community and more reliance on community news," says McCabe. The ferocity of the decline in the big metropolitan papers helps to explain why the Manchester Evening News, once the nation's biggest regional newspaper, was sold last month.
Whatever boost it may get in the future from political intervention, the regional press is running out of tricks for now. McCabe is blunt about their limited options: "The industry is shrinking back in on itself in a rather curious way. There are not a lot of levers that you can pull that will turn this around."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/01/regional-abcs

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