Johnston Press weekly title making £610k profit
Patrick Smith at themediabriefing.com got hold of some profit & loss figures for a Johnston Press weekly (he’s not saying which one but says the numbers come from a “reliable source”) and discovered it’s making over £620,000 a year.
The main points to note are:
Weekly circulation: 10,000
Monthly circulation revenue: £17,000
Monthly advertising revenue: £70,000
Monthly online revenue: £3,600 and rising
Total monthly revenue: £90,600
Monthly non-editorial commercial staff costs: £12,000
Monthly editorial staff costs: £16,000
Monthly printing, premises and distribution costs: £10,750
Total monthly operating costs: £38,750
Total monthly profit: £51,850
Total annual profit: £622,200
As Patrick mentions, there are no figures for other outgoings that all large business share – human resources, IT, editorial technology – but an annual profit margin of over £600k is still no small fry.
The news isn’t exactly a cause for celebration, but it does hint that the regional decline may not be happening at such a worrying rate across all aspects of the industry.
Johnston Press are £350m in debt and announced a statutory loss of £143.8m for the financial year 11/12.
Chief executive Ashley Highfield believes he can double JP’s current profit margin of 17% by 2020 by changing dailies to weeklies, launching a range of mobile apps and replacing some journalists with freelancers and citizen journalists.
Here are 2 interesting graphs from JP’s April ‘12 Vision, Strategy and Execution plan (pdf): that shed a little light on how Highfield plans to achieve those aims: