Less than two years after it morphed into a weekly paper, the presses have stopped rolling on what was the Liverpool Daily Post for the vast majority of its 158-year history.
The migration from daily to weekly publication has become a trend in some sections of a struggling provincial press in recent years. Yet while several titles have flourished under this new model, increasing their circulations compared to the latter days of their daily incarnations, the Liverpool Post faced a bigger challenge than some - and it came from within the same building.
With its sister publication, the Liverpool Echo, selling ten times as many print copies, the clock was always ticking for the Post. To its great credit, the relaunched paper tried to offer something distinctive and adopted a more investigative approach, often leading with an exclusive on some aspect of public life in the city. Unfortunately, these scoops, combined with detailed analysis and specialist business and arts coverage, failed to excite the dwindling newspaper-buying public of Merseyside (declaration: I bought the Post more often as a weekly than a daily, but still only if the lead story caught my eye).
The good news is that the closure isn't resulting in journalistic job losses. The bad news is laid bare by that same fact - this isn't about naked cost-cutting, it's purely due to lack of demand. Broadsheet-minded print titles appear fated to struggle at a local or regional level in times of falling circulations, as evidenced by the demise of the brilliant, but short-lived North West Enquirer in the mid-2000s.
Two years after the Post went weekly, there is still no answer to the question posed by this blog at the time - is there a new generation which simply doesn't care for what might be termed big-picture local news? Moreover, is the appetite for all forms of local news falling in proportion with collapsing readerships?
Website traffic for the local and regional press is, unsurprisingly, on the rise. However, whilst it might be reassuring to suggest an inversely proportional relationship between the two, on-line hits don't always equate to the fully-rounded experience of reading a print copy. Although every reader won't read every story in print, the process of flicking from cover-to-cover increases the likelihood of encountering journalism which the individual might never make the necessarily active choice to access on on-line. Factor in links to suggestions for similar stories and it's easy to see why even regular website visitors could end up with a rather narrowly-focused diet of local news.
The Liverpool Echo has promised to absorb both the staff and the substance from its sister publication and, although it has shed tens of thousands of its own readers in the last decade, the paper's circulation appears remarkably healthy when compared with others serving similar-sized urban areas. And that has to be welcomed, because the need for local news - whatever the commercial realities - hasn't diminished in the digital age.
The local press is a vital component of journalism's ecosystem. Whatever those of us in broadcast might like to think about our ability to originate, there's many a local radio station and regional television newsroom that would notice the difference if they started each day without local papers as a reliable reference point.
So Liverpool is unable to sustain two daily papers in 2014 - hardly news worthy of holding the front page. A sad change, certainly, but not seismic - yet. That tag can be reserved for if the day ever comes when it can't sustain even one.
