It’s been a week of rumours accelerating around north Denbighshire about the future of its newspapers. There were first threats of redundancies, then apparently a photographer has already left the Trinity Mirror Visitor series. These rumours affect the sister free newspaper Your Vale serving Rhuthun, available largely at supermarkets.The regional newspaper business has year on year seen a downturn in sales. Regional dailies and evening titles are hardest hit but weekly newspapers are also under pressure. Some give them no more than 10 years. And advertising’s expected to be hit as the recession strengthens.
Today’s Free Press from rival North Wales Newspapers crows that it will soon become the only paper dedicated to the Vale of Clwyd, with the pending abandonment of Your Vale, only launched in early June. Your Vale replaced free sheet Vale Advertiser, a paper with a history in Rhuthun & Dinbych of over 20 years. Yopur Vale's launch edition admitted that the Vale had been disappointing in recent times.
Readers of this site concluded that the slimmed down Your Vale was a shadow, a poor relation but that its web site & content were good and much improved.
Hang on, though, Free Press. What about the promised new Denbighshire Visitor, replacing Your Vale and the Rhyl Visitor? Funnily enough, it was something we mooted back in June as a viable solution to a Vale Advertiser replacement that, as Your Vale, was cut down to just 28 pages. It may concentrate more on Rhyl and Prestatyn news but at least it offers a reasonable alternative to the otherwise Free Press/Rhyl Journal monopoly to come. And Dinbych at any rate looks to Rhyl for work, leisure and shopping. It seems a sensible move in terms of economies of scale and the market it needs to serve, bringing all of Denbighshire together.
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