Job Axe Falls On Two Senior Editors At Surrey Advertiser Offices

Published on: 29 Jan, 2017
Updated on: 22 Feb, 2017

Two senior editors based at the Surrey Advertiser offices at Stoke Mill, Guildford, are losing their jobs as part of parent company Trinity Mirror’s latest redundancies.

Trinity Mirror’s offices at Stoke Mill, Guildford.

They are are among 78 redundancies among Trinity Mirror’s regional newspaper network, as reported by the industry newspaper and website for journalism, the Press Gazette.

Since the turn of the Millennium, local newspapers throughout the UK have a had a tough time with ever decreasing sales and readership.

In the halcyon days of the 1980s and 90s, the Surrey Advertiser’s weekly circulation was in the region of 45,000 copies alone, plus healthy circulations of its close sister tiles the Woking News & Mail (in the region of 20,000 copies per week) and Esher News & Mail (11,000 copies per week).

In 2010, GMG offered for sale a number of its publications and a number of the Surrey titles were bought by Trinity Mirror. The Woking News & Mail was exempt from Trinity Mirror’s purchase and GMG later suspended its publication. The title has since been acquired by local business Knaphill Print and is once again in circulation.

The Esher News & Mail also ceased as a separate newspaper and today the Surrey Advertiser not only has its long-standing Guildford, Godalming, Cranleigh and Mole Valley editions, but also Elmbridge and Woking editions, effectively incorporating the titles of the Esher and Woking newspapers.

According to the Surrey Advertiser’s Get Surrey on-line newspaper, the weekly circulation of the printed Surrey Advertiser (presumably including all its editions) is 22,801.

However, this page may be a little out of date as it also refers to its free newspaper the Surrey Times. Printing of this ceased in November 2014.

The organisation that compiles statistics of newspaper and magazine circulations in the UK is the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Details published online refer to a combined total circulation certificate of the Surrey Advertiser for the period January to December 2014. It records the average monthly circulation as being 18,235 copies.

As sales of printed newspapers have fallen, Trinity Mirror, like others in local media faced with new challenges, has focused on the online versions if its titles with rigorous canvassing for its lifeblood – paid-for advertising. This has been combined with strong use of social media, including Twitter and Facebook.