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It was founded by Scottish businessman Peter Stewart Macliver and Newcastle journalist Walter Reid and first published on June 1, 1858. Macliver went on to also found the Bristol Evening Post and the Bristol Observer. The Western Daily was bought by Bristol United Press (BUP), the same company which publishes the Bristol Evening Post, in 1959 and since 1974 has been based at the company's building in Temple Way. BUP was bought in 1999 by the Daily Mail and General Trust, the media conglomerate which also publishes mass-circulation UK tabloid the Daily Mail and is now part of the its Northcliffe Group of regional newspapers. As with most UK titles, the Western Daily Press has been fighting declining newspaper circulation figures in recent years and now sells fewer than 30,000 copies per day. This is a particular problem for the Western Daily Press since its circulation area is very wide and costs of distributing papers and maintaining local journalists are disproportionately high. In 2005 a number of staff were laid off at BUP titles, with management trying to achieve economies through sharing of resources between the different papers. This prompted some Western Daily Press journalists to attempt to auction themselves on eBay as a joke. The National Union of Journalists has been highly critical of these cuts and is particularly active in Bristol; the union says that despite declining circulation the newspapers remain extremely profitable, partly due to advertising revenue, and that the economies are being driven by the unrealistic expectations of shareholders. The current editor is Tim Dixon. The playwright Tom Stoppard started his career as a journalist on the Western Daily Press. In May 2009 it was announced that printing of the Press, and sister paper the Bristol Evening Post would be moved to Didcot in Oxfordshire. This has led to some distribution timing difficulties owing to the aforementioned wide circulation area and, consequently, supplies to the far South West of the UK have now ceased. In April 2010, it was announced that the editing and sub-editing of the Press would be undertaken in Plymouth and that the publication would undergo a revamp to make it similar in appearance to the Western Morning News which is also edited and sub-edited out of Plymouth. The sale figure has subsequently plummetted. In May 2010, it was announced that the Western Daily Press would now be published as a single edition, and no longer in two (Somerset/Late City, Bath/Wiltshire/Severnside). |
