It’s always with a heavy heart that any journalist has to write about the demise of newspapers and magazines. Those working for news organisations will always post a bunch of comments and stats that people love a physical newspaper or magazine in their hand and doomsayers are overplaying it.
All I can ever do is say look to the figures. And today we have the added help of those figures coming from the industry’s own News Media Association (NMA), via Deloitte.
So here is the figure that is hard to swallow, and it comes direct from the NMA. In the decade running up to 2015 the UK’s local and national newspapers (excluding the Financial Times) saw revenue roughly halve to just over five billion pounds. There you have it. Newspapers are making half the money they used, and the only area in which revenues are significantly growing is digital — and there are a whole heap of issues for them there.