Daily Mail and General Trust previously announced it expected the 100 newspapers in its regional arm, Northcliffe Media, to return to growth at the end of this year. But now the UK publisher says the announcement was a bit premature, and it currently is unable to tell when the regional titles will recover from recent economic hardships, MediaGuardian reported today.

"We don't know yet, I have no idea as we don't have that visibility," Peter Williams, DMGT's finance director, told MediaGuardian. "It is a bit disappointing - certainly around Christmas, if trends had continued, we should have moved into revenue growth by the spring or summer. It has remained stubbornly slightly negative."
However, on Wednesday the Financial Times reported that DMGT did managed to beat expectations for the third quarter, thanks to growth in business operations and an improving national advertising landscape. Williams told the FT that retail has been the strongest sector. However, regionals saw advertising and circulation revenues down 4 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

DMGT's net debt is currently down to £970 million, the Scotsman reported.

The Daily Mail and General Trust's Mail Online is the latest UK news website to bar online media monitoring service Meltwater from crawling its content by using the robots.txt site control protocol, paidContent reported yesterday.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom's most visited newspaper website is hoping to find similar successes across the pond; it has opened an office in Los Angeles and hired editorial and sales employees. The newspaper plans to begin producing content for mass-market U.S. audiences and has chosen to remain a free-to-view news site, New Media Age reported today. The news site will explore editorial and sales capabilities around Hollywood-related news, and appears as a tab on the Daily Mail's homepage titled "U.S. Showbiz."

The Daily Mail began behavioural targeting across its U.S. inventory last year - a smart move, as ABC Electronic's monthly reports for the last five months show that more than half of the site's unique users (2.4 million daily) are from outside the United Kingdom, NMA noted.

Daily Mail and General Trust Plc reported a profit for the fiscal first half of the year, due to cutting costs in its newspaper unit and asset sales, Bloomberg reported today.

The publisher of the Daily Mail newspaper's net income in the six months up to April 4 was £92.7 million, compared to a loss of £172.9 million in the first half of last year, the company announced in a statement. Adjusted operating profit was £144 million, which beat market expectations of £142 million, the Irish Times noted.

Image: the Daily Mail
The increase is also partly due to improving advertising trends in Britain, which is hoped will lead to growth in the second half.

"Whilst we remain cautious about the outlook, particularly in the UK, we are increasingly well positioned to weather current economic uncertainties and to take advantage of improved conditions as they materialise," the company stated, according to the Irish Times.

Daily Mail and General Trust Chairman Lord Rothermere said it is "unlikely" that his company will sell any more titles, after tabloid newspaper the London Evening Standard was bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev, Press Gazette reported Monday.

Rothermere also mentioned that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday will not be put on the market. The titles are expected to shift to Associated Newspapers' headquarters in the near future.
"It is our duty to look at any offer on all of our businesses, but I can't see a circumstance where we would sell another newspaper unless there was a strategic imperative," the chairman said. "Right now, it is hard to see how the industry has got the capacity to consolidate, with both the regulatory framework and in terms of issues revolving round some of the other players."