Stop piling them up, and start reading them
The relentless year on year sales declines for Britain’s principal newspapers continue. Take apart the ABC figures released Friday and strip out the bulk giveaways (which nobody pays for) and the erratic foreign sales allows you to look at the number of copies that are bought somewhere in the UK and Ireland. And once again they show sales declines of between 3 per cent and 10 per cent.
Of the dailies, The Sun and the Daily Mail fare the best – no surprise given the editorial investment in the titles and their cheap prices. But the ‘quality’ papers far worse – although The Times can say it has erased some of the 47,000 sales decrease with its paid for online service – which adds back at least 15,000 online subscribers and 12,500 iPad readers at the very cheap £10 a month. The Indy, meanwhile, which pads out its headline figures with considerable bulk giveaways (62,433 last month) , is now below 100,000.
At at £1 a day, you have to ask if readers think the ‘broadsheet’ papers are too expensive…however, given that a 10p cut would cost £2.6 million for every 100,000 buyers (and not obviously much sales gain) it would be expensive unless more savings can be found from editorial budgets. After all, there is so much news available for free online and from the BBC, the need for a daily trip to the newsagent is clearly less great.
There is one crumb of comfort. If it looks like serious, upmarket types seem to be giving up on newspapers there are some signs that the downwards trend is moderating. The headline sales figures for 2010 show more modest rates of decline, particularly for the Times and Telegraph. Maybe Tory readers are loving the Coalition so much they need to read all about it.
But the fact remains that the trend is downwards – anywhere between 10 and 20 per cent every three years. Which when you think about it are big proportions.
Here are the figures for the dailies (Sundays to follow…)
| Dailies | Jul-09 | Jul-10 | Decline | Decline |
| Daily Mirror | 1,277,387 | 1,179,573 | 97,814 | 7.7% |
| Daily Record | 325,385 | 308,756 | 16,629 | 5.1% |
| Daily Star | 858,679 | 817,328 | 41,351 | 4.8% |
| The Sun | 3,035,973 | 2,950,437 | 85,536 | 2.8% |
| Daily Express | 692,986 | 626,672 | 66,314 | 9.6% |
| Daily Mail | 1,919,394 | 1,866,511 | 52,883 | 2.8% |
| Daily Telegraph | 668,958 | 633,833 | 35,125 | 5.3% |
| Financial Times | 83,204 | 76,773 | 6,431 | 7.7% |
| The Guardian | 278,525 | 254,419 | 24,106 | 8.7% |
| The Independent | 104,539 | 97,794 | 6,745 | 6.5% |
| The Times | 499,193 | 452,044 | 47,149 | 9.4% |
Now, it’s the turn of the Sundays, and the picture looks far grimmer. With a couple of exceptions (Mail on Sunday, Sunday Telegraph) sales have sank. The Sundays have been hit harder by cost cutting, and The Observer wounded by talk about its possible closure. With advertising shifting from Sunday to Saturday, the financial pressure on the Sunday titles are greater. Meanwhile the soft performance of the Express and Star titles shows that it is hardly surprising that Richard Desmond is focusing on television.
| Jun-09 | Jun-10 | Decline | Decline | |
| Daily Star Sunday | 393,324 | 350,776 | 42,548 | 10.8% |
| News of the World | 3,010,779 | 2,793,553 | 217,226 | 7.2% |
| Sunday Mirror | 1,192,546 | 1,100,054 | 92,492 | 7.8% |
| The People | 564,318 | 511,069 | 53,249 | 9.4% |
| Sunday Express | 604,962 | 530,624 | 74,338 | 12.3% |
| Mail on Sunday | 1,781,173 | 1,717,029 | 64,144 | 3.6% |
| Independent on Sunday | 82,599 | 74,912 | 7,687 | 9.3% |
| The Observer | 348,051 | 294,261 | 53,790 | 15.5% |
| The Sunday Telegraph | 492,392 | 473,269 | 19,123 | 3.9% |
| The Sunday Times | 1,106,265 | 1,007,048 | 99,217 | 9.0% |
