Salford Advertiser Ends Rounds

Posted in News by Rachel - Jan 22, 2010

Paper Crisis – the end of local news?

Exclusive: This week’s distrubition of the Salford Advertiser to homes is to be it’s last.

Owners – the M.E.N / Guardian Media Group claim it will still be available online, and in “quality newsagents”. As Salford Youth Council reported last September in our newsletter – many newsagents in Salford stopped selling the Advertiser months ago and many claim they weren’t even told why. Most, if not all of them continue to sell the Manchester Evening News.

As a city-wide newspaper, the Advertiser (and others it has merged with over the years) has always been delivered directly to people’s homes. Not every home gets a copy due to their geographic location or lack of rounds in their area, but it has always been a FREE and accessible way for many local people to hear about important developments that directly effect them.

It is estimated around one third of all homes in Salford do not have internet access, the availablity of digital tv news and radio is on the rise but free papers are often the only access to local news to so many, often disadvatanged people.

Job Losses for the Lowest Paid

Now many of the city’s most lowest-paid workers (many of them younger people and the elderly) are out of a job or any alternative income. Considering newspapers are legally allowed to pay them just £2.50 an hour it is surprising the lowest paid workers have been dropped with only one weeks notice. – Hence why, instead of the familiar paper-round staff delivering this week,  you will may have witnessed Royal Mail staff delivering the Advertiser’s final edition to homes this week.

However unavoidable this decision may seem for the M.E.N media group considering the poor financial climate, - the almost end of the city’s free, weekly newspaper can only serve to make things worse.

Salford Youth Council believes this decision to end paper-rounds will be detrimental to ALL residents of Salford.

Perhaps the Salford Star will be resurrected soon as a printed edition and take it’s place?

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Update: 26th Jan 2010

Despite some confusion at first, it appears we were correct all along. It took until Tuesday to get an explanation. We did attempt to get more answers from M.E.N Media’s distribution office before this article was written, but no-one was available to comment. Over the weekend M.E.N employees were telling people to ignore our article as it “isn’t true”.

The long and short of it is… if your street/block/neighbourhood is POOR (apparently that means not attractive to advertisers) then you won’t get a free local newspaper… but lucky you if your home is “economically attractive” enough. If not, maybe you could move house?

Here is a statement issued 26/01/10 from the M.E.N Media Group:

“Every two years or so M.E.N Media takes a detailed look at its coverage maps and restructures the distribution pattern of its titles. In order to remain in the marketplace and attractive to advertisers we alter the households that receive a home delivered free newspaper.

“We have just completed the process of informing our readers of the small changes to our distribution giving them details of how they can receive their local news going forward.

“The changes affect a small number of homes across Greater Manchester and our household penetration remains amongst the highest in the UK.”

That’s an awful lot of homes…