An interesting comment with the Archant results yesterday. (For those who don't know it, Archant is the private group which evolved from Eastern Counties Newspapers into a much larger local newspaper and magazine business.)
John Fry, the chairman, compared the flat to slightly declining circulation of evening papers to much steeper declines in BBC and ITV viewing.
Now that's interesting, because we have the idea of local newspapers (indeed newspapers in general) being in endemic decline. Circulations keep falling and have been doing so for years.
But local newspapers are used to it. Most of them are incredibly stingy operations; costs are tightly controlled. And there are lots of games you can play at the margin - promotions, new points of sale - to get circulation to level off.
Television isn't used to it. Television was growth until, what, five years ago? And the major channels are still trying to cope with the erosion of their viewer share by the multichannel universe.
Besides, local paper groups are finding strategies that enable them to grow. At Archant, investment has been directed to the magazines and the websites, and it seems to be working.
Now this has made me look again at Johnston Press. The shares have collapsed since April - from 490p to 383p - and they're now trading at only ten times earnings. Plus you get a well covered dividend at 2.7% - not huge, but certainly a consideration. I just wonder whether it might be time to reconsider this stock...
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