You’ll miss it when its gone.

The Shropshire Star has once again suffered substantial drop in daily circulation figures according to the latest ABC report.

While it’s true that circulation figures for regional newspapers is on the decline across the UK, some have fared better than others.

From July to December 2023, the audited circulation for the Shropshire Star was just under 9000 a day, down a painful 22% on the previous period. If you wondered why the push for digital subscriptions was front and centre, this is it.

It’s not a direct comparison but the reach of Telford Live! on Facebook alone is around 60,000 a day, and that’s almost all Telford based.

Advertising which paid for the journalists to sit in court, do the investigations and write the stories has been shrinking. Autotrader, Indeed and Rightmove have pulled the revenue rug from under local papers as the formerly lucrative trinity of cars, jobs and property advertising moved online. Thinner papers, skinnier margins.

If the business of news is not generating the money to pay for court reporting and investigations, no one is going to do them.

One interesting statistic is that the ABC reports just over 500 daily copies delivered digitally. Do you care enough to pay for this content to be delivered to your screens?

The news comes less than a year since the Shropshire Star, as part of MNA, was acquired by National World in an £11m deal.