Mike Packwood

The first in a series of recollections from my career in the regional press, starting with a look a a truly elusive beast: The newspaper sales Representative The Rep – champion tea drinkers I was never entirely sure what Newspaper Sales representatives were for – not in the context of the noughties and onwards  in any case. There must have been a time, decades ago, when having people to call on shop keepers and discuss your titles and how to improve their sale would have been useful. But by the time email had been invented along with computerised systems that logged how many copies a shop had received and how many they had sold – and could therefore adjust supply accordingly, it became increasingly hard to justify the existence of the Rep. At the Western Mail and Echo (based in Cardiff and publishing papers throughout Wales) there were loads of them. And I mean loads – 30, 40. I don’t think any,ne really new how many there were. If you were a newsagent you would have yo