Mike Packwood

Once a week all over the land, the head of circulation at a newspaper will receive an email. The often dreaded sales figures email. On this your career rests. You are either saved for another week and the children can eat, or you’ve just added another nail to your circulation career coffin. Because, be in no doubt, if the figures are poor, It’s all your fault . The email will have come from your stats team, or perhaps from the wholesaler who handles your logistics for you. It will have been shared at precisely the same time you received it with many stakeholders throughout the business, such as editors, the MD, sales directors and the like, as well as your own team. There is nowhere to hide. You can hear the silence around the building as everyone opens the email and digests the contents, line by line and minus figure by minus figure. Then, depending on the size of your building there may be about 10 minutes respite before you hear the MD’s or (even worse) the editors feet...

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 newsagen...

It's a shame that Northampton no longer has its Herald and Post free newspaper. It closed its doors, or rather had its doors closed for it in 2016 by Trinity Mirror, who ended up being its final custodian. Its closure was inevitable. The newspaper marketplace has changed beyond recognition since the Post, as it what originally called, first hit the streets in the mid 70's, and its true to say that it had never been the same since it moved from private ownership - owned by people who launched and nurtured it, to being just another very small cog in a mammoth corporate wheel (of misfortune). The second home of Post Newspapers: Newspaper House in Derngate I began my newspaper career at the Post in the late 70's as a paper boy and then as a van driver (part tine while still attempting to be a pop-star, details of which you'll find elsewhere on this blog). I think I joined full time about 5 years into the life of the Post. It had begun as a paid for title competing wit...

How much do you value your local Evening Newspaper.  Do you still read it.  Do you value it. Would you miss it if  it wasn't there? These are all questions the regional press has wrestled with for years. The gradual decline in press readership has been with us for decades. ( Peak UK newspaper readership was in 1946/7). Its been falling every year since.   The regional press has withstood the onslaught of commercial TV and radio, mass delivery free newspapers, 24/7 news channels, hyper local magazines and now local TV too in some places. Throughout all of this your local daily has remained steadfastly the champion of local news delivery and  they are still largely respected and valued in their communities.  But consider this. When was the last time you actually bought your local paper? The answer to that is probably some time ago, or at least less frequently than you did. The sad truth of the matter ...