BOMBSHELL PAPER SALES PLUNGE

By Philin Applicationforms

ONE local business story that you WON’T be reading in any of Scroogequest’s comics in Cumbria is the latest sales disaster for the company’s two daily “newspapers”.

The barely alive News & Scar, Carlisle – long on life support -sells well under 2,000 copies a night having plunged ANOTHER 12.4% year on year.

It’s selling 1,720 copies – DOWN 244 copies on the previous year.

It’s a similar story at the Evening Snail, Barrovia, where sales have slumped by 11.7% in the last year.

They too are hovering around the 2,000 copies a night mark. (Down from 2,270 a year ago.)

Losing 250 readers year-on-year, it is hard to see how the two titles can survive the next two to three years – never mind until the end of this decade which will roar up in five years.

In terms of the N&S, without the contributions of its hugely impressive Carlisle United writer and every gory stab and slash of its Court reporter, it could be argued that sales would already be below 1,720 copies a night.

In an area with a voting population of circa 75,000, it means just over 2% of the public are BOTHERING to buy a paper copy of the News & Scar!

Could readers possibly be bored by the endless diet of Helen Skelton stories; pages and pages of minor planning applications; who’s playing at the Brickyard, and unquestioned press releases saying how great Labour is?

And what are Scroogequest’s short to medium goals?

With its focus now firmly on Clickbait and Page Views, young Churnalists could unwittingly be writing their own redundancies if behind the scenes the company is silently withdrawing from print to justify another massacre in staff numbers?

The Chronic can envisage a secret “model” doing the rounds where Cumbria’s six Scroogequest titles are fed by a low-cost, home-based web team of just half a dozen hacks.

All we can say is, will the last one to leave please turn out the lights.