THE Paisley Daily Express may have done well to notch up an impressive sales lift in the latest ABC returns, but let’s not pretend it signals a renaissance in the fortunes of our printed titles. Like the monthly national newspaper sales, the bi-annual regional and weekly figures just published paint a depressingly familiar picture of unremitting gloom across the country.
But it’s a story we know only too well, so here’s a radical thought: let’s ditch the digits of doom for a while and seek solutions from across the globe that perhaps promise a brighter and better future.
Why, for example, are newspaper sales booming in that hotbed of technology, Asia? What’s the secret of the Swedish newspaper which has won back all of its property advertising – 25 per cent of its ad revenue – from online rivals? And how does a French daily still manage to sell around 800,000 copies a day, and employ 500 journalists, in a region with the same population as Scotland?
