Newsquest Herald and Times Ltd, owner of The Herald, Sunday Herald and Glasgow Evening Times, has surprised many members of staff by posting healthy pre-tax profits of £23.8 million on sales of £86.8m for the year to December 31 2007.
The figure represented a decline of just 1.2% on the £24.1 million profits made by the company in the 53 weeks to December 2006, and a 1.7% decrease on the last year’s turnover of £88.3m.
Profits at the Glasgow-based group, acquired for £216 million by McLean, Virginia-based Gannett in 2003, represented 26.7% of the entire profit made by Newsquest across its entire UK newspaper division which owns 17 daily titles (including the Yorkshire Post) and nearly 300 weeklies.
In a statement, Tim Blott managing director of Newsquest Herald & Times, said: “I am very grateful to all our staff for their hard work during a challenging year. The growth during 2007 of our internet business, S1, is highly encouraging but did not fully compensate for the slowdown in newspaper revenues. Our printing and magazine divisions also performed well in a deteriorating market.
“Looking ahead, our continuing efforts to build audience and improve efficiency will become even more crucial during the current economic downturn.”
However, some members of staff — some of whom are ex colleagues of mine at the Sunday Herald, and many of whom joined an NUJ walk-out over compulsory redundancies in July 2007 — were said by AllMediaScotland to be “aghast” at the newspaper group’s levels of profitability, considering the cuts to which their papers have been subjected.
This blog post was published on 18 September 2008