S ales of the Daily Record crashed below 200,000 last month with average sales of just 195,223 during November- a year-on-year drop of 10.7%.
While newspapers in general fight against the digital swamping of news and entertainment the Record faces a bigger battle than most with it’s position as the mouthpiece of Scottish news and opinion long gone.
The recent independence campaign saw the newspaper cut itself off from 45% of it’s potential readership with most of them coming from the under-40 age group desired by advertisers.
Backing David Cameron and Jim Murphy over ‘The Vow’ drove a deeper wedge between the newspaper and potential readers with their continued backing for the most despised politician in Scotland hardly likely to encourage new readers.
During the last 12 months the Record has lost heavyweight contributors Hugh Keevins, Mark Guidi and Tam Cowan on the back of James Traynor’s disastrous departure in which he was allowed to sign off by slaughtering his colleagues and publisher before a brief but lucrative spell at Ibrox.
Masterminding the Record on their latest projects is group content editor Steve Martin- fresh from a spell at the ‘Scottish’ Sunday Mirror where he took sales from 75,000 to under 30,000 in two years with the title currently selling a pitiful 15,672 copies in Scotland.
Martin rose through the ranks at the Mirror group in London thanks to his uncanny knack of coming up with celebrity scoops at little expense alongside Dan Evans and Graham Johnson.
Having tried a number of initiatives to halt the terminal decline the current Record policy seems to embrace the internet full on with the digital version carrying diverse stories such as Australian’s that have sex with their dog and a 20-year-old spot being busted!
Sports wise the Record’s slavish devotion to David Murray has lost them almost all credibility with the administration and liquidation of the Ibrox club all dumped at the door of ‘disgraced former owner’ Craig Whyte.
While the digital world examines the story in greater detail bringing various threads to life stretching from Murray to the Bank of Scotland through Duff & Phelps to Charles Green the Record wheels out Barry Ferguson to reassure readers that Coisty will get things right and take ‘Rangers’ back to their rightful place. In June 2012 the front page of the Record told it’s readers RFC-RIP.
The coming year promises to be just as challenging for the Record- another Armageddon at Ibrox and the demise of the Red Tories is likely to stretch credibility of the Glasgow based tabloid even tighter.
