THERE’S been an extraordinary collapse in sales of the Western Gazette’s West Dorset and Sherborne editions.
Sales of the West Dorset edition dropped to just 317 a week during the first half of this year, according to official circulation figures.
The Sherborne edition fell to 445 a week.
What were they before?
Look at this.
Average circulation of the Gazette’s West Dorset edition for the second half of last year (July – Dec 2009) was 2,663.
Sherborne’s average sale over the same period was 2,841.
So the West Dorset edition has lost 2,346 of its buyers – that’s 88%.
The Sherborne edition has lost 84% of its buyers (2,396).
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) certificate for the Western Gazette, over the first half of this year, is unusually revealing because of the paper’s merger between March and June of its West Dorset and Sherborne editions.
So you can see that at the start of this year the West Dorset edition was selling 925 copies a week, Sherborne 1,044.
If those numbers seem much less than the ones given above for the last six months of 2009, well, we must remember that those figures were averaged out over six months, and guess that they must have been considerably higher in the summer of 2009 than they were at the end of the year.
Anyway, come March 2010 the Western Gazette suddenly merged its Sherborne and West Dorset editions, with Sherborne initially given much greater prominence than West Dorset.
The merger was not well received in the Bridport area.
Nevertheless, sales for the joint edition from 18 March to 3 June averaged 2,304; that’s more than the combined total for West Dorset and Sherborne at the start of the year.
However, in June the two separate editions appeared again. At the time, a Western Gazette staffer told me, in conversation, that the merged edition had indeed proved to be particularly unpopular in the Bridport area, where readers had been deserting it.
Are they coming back? Buyers, once lost, can be hard to recover.
The ABC website only gives figures up until the end of June, which takes us back to where we started: West Dorset 317, Sherborne 445.
The Gazette’s circulation overall for Jan – June 2010 is recorded as 30,052 (down from 30,789 July – Dec 209).
So West Dorset now accounts for just over 1% of that, Sherborne nearly 1.5%.
Incidentally, the population of the area covered by West Dorset District Council, which obviously includes Sherborne, is about 97,000.
Editor’s Note: The drops above – 88% and 84% – look incredible, but they are based on official figures from the ABC, and they have been double-checked. Nevertheless, if there is some mistake lurking somewhere, I’d be pleased to have it pointed out to me.
A puzzle about circulation
There is a further question about all these figures that I don’t understand, which is how exactly it’s been worked out that the Western Gazette’s average circulation for Jan – June 2010 is 30,052.
According to the ABC, it’s selling 3,847 in North Dorset, 12,345 in Yeovil, 3,482 in Crewkerne and 5,253 in South Somerset. That’s 25,017 in total. Then there’s an average of 280 added for multiple bulk sales, making 25,297.
The average figures for West Dorset and Sherborne are more difficult to work out, because of the odd periods of time that different editions were for sale, but let’s just – as an indicative figure – add up the different numbers for each edition and divide them by three.
We’ll cut the number for the merged West Dorset – Sherborne edition in half, giving 1,152 of the total recorded sale of 2,304 to each.
So, West Dorset: 925 + 1,152 + 317 = 2394, divided by three = 798.
Sherborne: 1,044 + 1,152 + 445 = 2641, divided by three = 880.
Add 798 and 880 to the previous total of 25,297 and you’ve got 26,695.
That is an indicative figure only but it’s still not very close to 30,052.
As I hinted before, I’ve got a horrible feeling I’m missing something here, or that there’s a mistake lurking somewhere, which is why I’ve been worrying at these calculations.
So I’ll say again: if anyone can enlighten me, please do.
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There’s a lesson here for the accountants who run our regional press – cut content and quality at your peril. Eventually readers ask themselves, why am I bothering to pay for this? Dorset Echo take note!
The profit motive is killing local papers like this. Ten percent is not enough, so they cut costs, pay the reporters peanuts, slash investment, in an effort to increase margins to twenty plus percent. It works for a while and I’m sure the top brass all get their bonuses, until the readers start to realise the paper has turned into a two bit sensation rag… A new era of rebuilding awaits them.
I wouldn’t say the Western Gazette was a sensation rag. It had a period when it went that way about ten years ago – maybe more? – when one of its reporters used to write about issues such as the misuse of public toilets in Dorchester’s Borough Gardens and the ones just off the A35 east of Dorchester. Readers didn’t like it much, and things settled down again when he went to cover Crewkerne instead (I’m pretty sure it was Crewkerne).
The Gazette now is rather sober. In fact, people tend to say that it could do with livelier layout & presentation of stories.
It’s partly a matter of taste, don’t you think? I remember when I used to work on the Basingstoke Gazette, the subs were ordered to tone things down, which they didn’t like, and a story I’d written appeared as a p2 or p3 lead with the headline – Boundary Commission revamps constituency alterations.
The headline was meant to be as dull as possible, in protest, almost encouraging people to ignore it – but it’s stuck in my mind!