Herald Group Identifies 'Compelling Mix' Behind 'Bucking Media Trend'

A “compelling mix of news, incisive analysis and great photographs” is being identified today by the Herald & Times Group for their papers “bucking media industry trends”.

Says the group, “Herald sales have recently shown their best year-on-year performance, while the Sunday Herald was the only British national quality Sunday title to grow sales in the first half of this year.”

It continues: “The Evening Times, which is also part of the Herald & Times Group’s newspaper stable, is showing its best sales performance compared with last year and circulation of more than 61,000 copies a day.”

The story appears on page 5 of today's edition of The Herald.

It adds: “The group’s online audiences are also growing, with almost one million users last month of heraldscotland.com, the joint web site of The Herald and Sunday Herald. The Evening Times saw its online traffic last month jump by more than 40 per cent from last year.”

Last week, allmediascotland reported Audit Bureau of Circulations figures saying Evening Times sales were down between June last year and June this year, by 10.9 per cent – from 63,803 to 56,843. 

Last month, the latest average net circulation figures showed – as also reported by allmediascotland – the July 2009-July 2010 figures for The Herald were down from 55,707 to 51,973, some 6.7 per cent. Similarly, for the Sunday Herald, the July 2009-July 2010 figures were 39,882 versus 40,312, down 1.1 per cent.

In the Herald report, Jonathan Russell, who took the helm just six weeks ago as editor-in-chief, is quoted, saying: “We are delighted that our readers and advertisers are showing their appreciation of the great journalism in all our titles.”

And Tim Blott, managing director of the group, is further quoted: “These are challenging times for the media industry but our titles are performing strongly with their offerings of quality content in the highly competitive Scottish media market.”