How much longer can the Chronicle survive? Plummeting sales continue… | OneFootball

Back in the day, The Chronicle was where Newcastle United fans got pretty much all of their news.

At its height, The Chronicle (Newcastle Evening Chronicle) used to sell as many as 200,000 copies per day.

You couldn’t walk down a street in Newcastle City Centre without passing a seller.

A full-time job, six days a week numerous blokes selling the various editions that were updated throughout each day.

Whilst for the vast majority, who didn’t work in the city centre, you had The Chronicle delivered to your door or picked it up at a local shop.

In the modern day, a very different story.

The paper versions of The Chronicle and other regional newspapers continue to plummet.

The massive profits easily generated via printed newspapers now a thing of the past, back in the day local newspapers dominant when it came to supplying news on Newcastle United and other local news/sport.

The days of the massive Chronicle offices down the Bigg Market are long gone as well, only a relatively tiny number still employed, compared to what was the case in the past.

Reach are the owners of The Chronicle and indeed the vast majority of other local newspapers in the UK, as well as owning national titles such as the Mirror.

Massive cuts in the numbers working for local and national newspapers, as Reach and other publishers look at how they can survive.

With ever collapsing printed newspaper sales, you have to wonder how long The Chronicle and others can continue in that format. Elsewhere, many printed local newspapers are no longer still going.

This week a new report from Press Gazette has updated on local newspaper sales across the UK, these are the average sales figures per day from January-June 2025 of each of the ‘best’ selling paper versions of the regional newspapers:

As you can see, The Chronicle has gone from selling 200,000 copies per day back at its peak, to now averaging only 5,440 sales per day across the first six months of 2025. That figure a 15% drop on the first six months of 2024.

This trend is all across the various regional newspapers, sales dropping 15% or so every year, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it won’t take many more of those yearly falls to make the paper versions not viable, if that isn’t the case already.

As you can see above, no regional newspaper in England has average sales of 10,000 per day, with those latest figures showing the Liverpool Echo highest (in England), with average sales of 9,008 per day across January-June 2025.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, it is actually now coming up to the 20th anniversary of the very last edition of The Pink. Saturday 17 December 2005 was the very last time that was published. Nothing lasts forever I suppose.