The London free newspaper City AM has put itself up for sale, as print outlets continue to struggle with the collapse of the advertising market and the increasing cost of paper.
Its founders said they had been in talks with new investors but are now looking for an outright sale of the newspaper, which distributes 70,000 copies a day targeting financial workers.
One insider said City AM was a “small fish in a widespread dynamiting of the advertising ocean”, with media agencies continuing to shift advertising budgets away from print titles and on to tech platforms owned by Facebook and Google.
City AM has also been hit hard by changing commuting habits and the Covid pandemic, which left the newspaper carrying £1.2m in debt at the end of 2021. The outlet previously published a print edition every weekday but made its Friday edition digital only in January because few financial workers were bothering to go into their offices at the end of the week.
The UK’s remaining free newspapers have had a torrid time in recent years, racking up substantial losses and cutting staff numbers in the face of declining advertising revenue. Eyeballs have drifted to smartphones, while the looming arrival of 4G mobile signal on the London Underground network means commuters will always be able to read something while travelling in tunnels.
At the same time, the cost of printing hundreds of thousands of newspapers and getting them on to the streets has skyrocketed, with paper shortages and printworks closures hitting hard.
Evgeny Lebedev’s Evening Standard has cut its circulation to 310,000, is heavily lossmaking and on some days prints just 28 pages of material. It recently appointed the former GQ boss Dylan Jones as editor, the first person to hold that post on a permanent basis since Emily Sheffield left in October 2021.
Metro, owned by the Daily Mail’s parent company, continues to distribute 950,000 copies a day but has made deep cuts to its staffing levels with many longstanding journalists leaving.
City AM said there was “an opportunity to build on the brand’s recognition and rapidly diversify and expand” its revenue stream. A spokesperson said the outlet attracted about 2 million readers a month to its website, while its print audience consisted of relatively wealthy readers with disposable income.
There are predictions that some print publications could start to disappear altogether, with just one printing company remaining in the UK that is capable of producing magazines. Paid-for newspaper circulations have been in steady decline for almost two decades, with growing questions about whether the distribution network that delivers copies to shops is sustainable.
