Venue, the long-running listings magazine for Bristol and Bath is to be axed – just over a year after its owner, London-based newspaper group Northcliffe, claimed to have ‘saved’ it. The magazine, first published in 1982, is to become a ‘digital-only’ product.
Hundreds of readers protested in February last year when Northcliffe, which also owns the Bath Chronicle, announced plans to close the magazine, claiming it had no future due to a fall off in buyers and advertisers.
Following the outcry – and record sales of the ‘final’ edition – Venue was merged into Northcliffe’s existing monthly giveaway lifestyle title Folio, retaining its distinctive title page, reviews and listings and unique journalistic style. Northcliffe trumpeted ‘saving’ the title, claiming it had listened to the readers.
However, today it announced the May edition of Folio will be the last to include Venue, although Folio itself will remain as a stand-alone monthly.
Venue’s website will continue to operate and its listings and reviews will be used in the Friday edition of the Bristol Evening Post, the Bristol Observer and the local edition of Metro. Venue’s publishing director Dave Higgitt will leave the business next month, said Northcliffe, the regional newspaper division of the Daily Mail & General Trust.
The closure was announced alongside plans to axe the Saturday edition of the Bristol Evening Post and rename the paper as The Post. Some 20 editorial staff are expected to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts – the latest in a long line of redundancies at Northcliffe’s Bristol News and Media (BNM) operation.
The Post has not been an evening newspaper for the past three years since it switched to being been printed in the morning.
The paper also has not been printed in Bristol since the presses at Temple Way were closed several years ago. It is now printed in Oxfordshire.
BNM publisher Alan Renwick said in a statement this morning: “We have undertaken an exhaustive review of our portfolio and the changing needs of readers and advertisers in our market.
“These planned changes give us a more focused and flexible set of publications which are much more closely aligned to our customers and give us a better platform for future growth.”
Sales of the Post have fallen sharply in recent years – far faster than the national average for regional newspapers – a fact the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) say is linked to largescale job losses among editorial staff over recent years which has led to an inferior product.
The most recent ABC audited circulation figures for the Post, covering the six months to December 2011, show circulation plummeted by 9.2% to 36,262 during the period.
In 2009 Northcliffe axed around 45 editorial jobs at the Post and its sister paper the Western Daily Press, after cutting 36 journalists when it largely merged the two dailies in 2005.
Paul Breeden, chair of the Bristol branch of the National Union of Journalists, told BBC Radio Bristol this morning that it was “awful news” for the people of Bristol.
“This wasn’t on the cards and it is a great shock. It’s bad news for all the journalists at the Post and for the people of Bristol who depend on the Post,” he said.
“The editor Mike Norton has said he would listen seriously to proposals made by the NUJ and we will be putting forward plans to try to save jobs.”
