Tomorrow less than 50,000 copies of the Sunday Mail will be sold.
It is an incredible demise for the Glasgow publisher which once dominated the Scottish media, wrong uns dreaded featuring on their pages with The Judge and others having massive reach and impact.
Even as recently as 2019 the Sunday Mail was selling comfortably over 100,000 copies, still a significant number even if it was well down on the heydays when sales were counted by their tens of thousands.
A multitude of events have contributed to the collapse in sales but print must still be turning over a profit for Reach otherwise they would pull the plug and revert to digital only.
Sunday titles have felt the squeeze more than most, their previous special status has been virtually wiped out as publishers cut costs by reverting to seven day, 24 hour publishers with Sunday no different from any other day except the cover price is higher than the Daily Record.
Source Press Gazette.
Most of the Mail content is available online at 10.30pm on Saturday, soon afterwards any exclusive content is being used by other publishers and fan media sites with only the elderly and the declining non-digital audience likely to pick up their paper and discover any genuine news.
With the massive fall in circulation jobs have been a casualty, the names producing content online are likely to be found in the Scottish Daily Express and Scottish Daily Star who both bring out special Sunday editions.
In London Reach has virtually given up on The People and Sunday Mirror, only a few pages are different as content is merged with no real effort going in to their print editions.
Source Press Gazette.
Back in the early days of this century the Sunday Mail included a monthly sports supplement, it carried some depth with their team of writers able to take their time and come up with fresh, original content which is often set the agenda for the week ahead.
All of that is now looked on as vanity projects as more and more content is simply repackaging stories from social media which can be done without the need to cultivate contacts and expenses accounts.
The Sunday Mail is far from on its own dealing with off-the-cliff circulation falls as opposed to off the radar wealth. Fortunately clubs like Celtic still value their diminishing audience, creating time and access to provide them with content while keeping fan media at a distance.
It would be very hard to argue that the Sunday Mail provides greater reach and quality of content than The Celtic Exchange which has produced six in-depth podcasts giving the real background and detail of Fergus McCann’s Celtic takeover with reflections from some of the key players involved.
The 50,001 figure was the average print sales during February, by the summer when the European Championships are in full flow that figure will be hurtling towards 40,000 which most be approaching the stage when the costs of production and distribution are becoming very hard to justify.
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