A blow to an already struggling industry

Salopian

When Rupert Murdoch closed the NoW he imagined that many of its readers would transfer to the "Sun on Sunday" or something like that.

But that was last week. I doubt he'll even bother to try. Two reasons - he hasn't the cash (the BSkyB cash cow's gone and who'd want to buy a new Murdoch paper.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the Sun's circulation

Kris

Maybe micropayments is the answer instead of a paywall, because there is no way back for papers. There will always be a market for paper, but not at a profitable level. I think news magazines like Spectator, New Statesman and Private Eye will survive better as a paper copy.

Tiberius

Following on from other commentators, who have alluded to the nature of the readership in relation to the "success" of papers like NotW, I would say that two-thirds of seven million people are about to take the next step towards an existence akin to that of H G Wells' Eloi.

Jack Simpson

It is a shame - a sad and very sudden end to a major feature of British journalism.

Christopher Bowring

Is the second graph correct? It seems to show the Sunday Telegraph with a positive circulation in about 1957. The newspaper wasn't created until 1961.

Jez

There's been some bloody good & fresh journalism around this Murdoch thing though.

Steve Jones

I am not sure the NOTW readers will suddenly disappear and the "research" you refer to seems a bit far-fetched.

The Mail and the Mirror will definitely benefit - albeit not to the tune of 2.6m.

mark

solution is simple. people will pay for honest and well researched journalism. they won't pay for spin or stringers writing up press releases.

rather than moaning, delivering a product people feel is worth paying for is the way forward.

Clear Memories

More proof that the DTP is finished as the main former of public opinion. I suspect it is this recognition, not bravery, that has led to the MPs ‘standing up’ to Murdoch – but did they b*ll*x, they just realised that the internet was driving this story out no matter what they said or did and they would be better appearing to be heroic. We’ll see just what balls they’ve got when the BBC gets embroiled in this mess, which is as certain as night following day – they’ve already been caught lying about Primark and misrepresenting the Queen and let’s face it, BBC news and current affairs are run by the same sewer-dregs as the DTP.

It is the internet that is going to see Huhne jailed, it is the internet that will prove climate change is rubbish and it will be the internet that shapes the agenda for the future. TV, the DTP and Politicians can no longer lie and expect to get away with it – just look at the pasting Brown is getting when, in truth, there should be some sympathy for him and Sarah. But no, he has to blunder in, lie, twist, distort and try to rewrite history when t’internet has already exposed the rot. All he’s done is made a bigger prat of himself than most already considered him to be.

And if you don't believe Parliament has just woken up to the internet and its potential, just watch how sites like this and Order-Order somehow end up being dragged into the inquiry with the freedom of the 'net ending up under the same controls as the rest of the media when the dust finally clears.

Charlie the Chump

This is an obvious opportunity for the sacked editor and his 199 colleagues from NOW to start their own paper. Even if they only attracted half the readership of the old paper it would still break even.

jon dee

With the continued decline in the circulations of both regional and national newspapers, should not the plurality spotlight now be directed firmly on the BBC ?

With it's vast market dominance in news consumption per head, almost twice the size of the UK Murdoch press, even pre NOW folding, it's power will continue to grow as newspaper sales decline.

All this without having to earn a penny, it survives in a commercial paradise. With it's income assured, it's political regulation almost non-existent, it can afford to take a highly competitive stance towards any commercial rival.

Is'nt this what it has been doing in recent weeks ?

Ed P

From your graphs, it is astounding the Guardian/Observer have survived so long already. Perhaps the tax avoidance of GMG has helped?

Alex

@ Steve Jones

Think you're wrong Steve. I read the NotW principally for football. No other paper comes close (esp for Championship). Not really interested in another tabloid and not really interested in finding out.

morpork

Eh? What are these graphs supposed to be telling us? That the Guardian outsells the Sun? That the Observer outsells the NOTW? Is there some sort of inter-active, geeky thingummy that I'm supposed to do to re-align these graphs with reality?

Baron

Fraser, agreed, this is a major blow to the printed media, and pity it is, too, the readers of the NoW will disengage even more from things political, as may readers of other papers, and who can blame them, bad for the society at large, good for the BBC’s social engineering project, for the regulatory despotism of the agencies of the State.

Jonathan Jones

Christopher Bowring:

You're right, there was a mistake with the graph. The data was right, the problem was with the way the graph was drawn. Corrected version up now.

oldtimer

Brand loyalties usually are very high for most types of product. People bought the NOTW for its unique offering. Rivals that seek to win NOTW readers by replicating its style and content will risk losing their existing readership. A better bet might be to attract more advertising revenues appropriate to their reader profile.

Chris Stapleton

"This isn't to belittle Newsnight, which is a great programme for a specific audience...."

Yeah, Guardian and "Indie" (it's edgy) readers.

Herbert Thornton

This is such a fascinating topic that I'm striving to grasp the meaning of every comment on it.

Clear Memories' comments have me especially interested, but both his first sentence that refers to "the DTP" and his later references to it leave me completely mystified.

I've tried Googling "DTP": it mentions Desk Top Publishing but that seems implausible.

So please - anybody - what is "the DTP"?

David Ossitt

morpork

“Eh? What are these graphs supposed to be telling us?”

Well spotted morpork!

They are dreadful but I think that I have worked it out.

If I am correct it is the very right hand edge that has any significance, so that the Sun sells most then the Daily Mail and then the Mirror etc.

But it is a rubbish graph, if they had shown it as a simple column graph it would show how truly horrendous is the daily circulation of the BBC’s own Guardian.

Simon Stephenson.

Kris : 4.56pm

Micropayments seem to me to be such an obviously good way of doing it that I'm surprised that they've lost out to paywalls. The same, obviously, applies to TV. Necessarily contemporaneous transmissions will obviously still have to be timetabled, but everything else can surely be dealt with through a library system. Why does EastEnders have to be shown to everyone at 7.30pm - why not release each day's episode at, say, noon, and wait for people to log in and watch it, for a small fee, whenever they want to. Many people use SkyPlus to achieve just this, and if SkyPlus were free then more or less everyone would use it for this purpose. Why not just work towards delivering TV in the way the public seem to want?

I can't see that in this technological age that the processing of zillions of small payments is that much more expensive than processing a series of daily, weekly or monthly fees. Is it? My Internet Service Provider has to maintain intricate details of every demand I make of their system - and they're just a tiny organisation. So does the preference for paywalls over micropayments come down to the total amount of revenue expected to be collected? Do they need to continue expecting people to buy a load of stuff which they don't want in order to get access to that which they do?

morpork

The top line is the total newspapers sold, and the coloured bands show the share of this accounted for by the constituent papers. If you remember that it is called a Stacked Area Chart you'll have something to tell your grandchildren.

Commondog

The general trend shows a decided falling away, starting roughly around 1960 and plummeting throughout those subsequent decades during which the publications involved, were increasingly staffed by and stuffed with, purveyors of soft-leftist despondency and self-hatred.

Were we - are we - supposed to go along with all this and pay good money to carry on reading their debilitating fables?

D. Short

There is something dreadfully wrong with the second graphic, which just goes to show The Spectator should not try to ape The Economist, which has staff who understand these things.

So much for numeracy at the Spectator, which has diminished in all sorts of ways over the last decade.

But what about literacy? FN writes: " But the News of the World did inform and entertain seven million people of [sic]a Sunday".

Is he trying to appeal to the cor-blimey CE readers looking for a new weekly read?

This is the second piece in as many weeks that FN has used his Spectator position to defend the paper where he earned a considerable amount for not doing very much at all. As others on the NotW did!

Fraser Nelson

Mopork, it's a stacked (not overlapping) graph.

TomTom

Newspapers should be free. They work for PR agencies and Government Departments and should use their funds to become free newspapers. There is no reason to pay for adverts and propaganda

Dimoto

The final blow for many rural shops ?

Sporting Life should gain extra readers.

Clear Memories

Herbert Thornton
July 14th, 2011 7:40pm

DTP - Dead Tree Press
MSM - MainStream Media
BBC - Biased Bollox Corp.

Do keep up.

J H Holloway

I work on a magazine with a popular website and I'm betting on micropayments as the way forward. If we charged everybody visiting the site 5p per 24 hrs, the economics of the business would be transformed.

We need MicroPaypal, with the low security that goes with an account that can only be scammed at 5p a time. When it arrives English-language websites - which already have a global reach - will make plenty of money.

2trueblue

jon dee, it has to happen soon. there is no way that Liebores BBC can survive. We should be allowed a vote on it!
It is a shame that the newspapers have been so radically affected by the corrupt methods of the few.

M. Rowley

What this illustrates more than anything else is the extent to which bien pensant readers of the Guardian and Observer are grossly over represented in setting the news agenda and shaping public opinion. One of the reasons perhaps behind the disconnect between the people and their so-called leaders.

Peter Crawford

The graph is still through the looking-glass wrong. Who are the Audit Bureau of Circulations ? If taxpayer funded can we scrap them ?

Herbert Thornton

Clear /www.thedeadtreepress.com/

TrevorsDen

What does Salopian men - 'the SskyB cash cow is gone'?
Murdoch still owns 34% of BSB, exactly the same as previously. Where has it gone? It would have cost him billions to buy SKY - not doing so has saved him a fortune. Dim thinking - it makes it more likely he will keep his papers not sell them.

suggests the Mail will pick up NOTW readers. They will not pick up those NOTW readers who bought BOTH the NOTW and Mail. Many people bought the NOTW and another paper on Sunday. We have austerity - people will just not buy an alternative.

Its not a rubbish graph - if people had brains they would see that it shows the individual circulations and the total of all papers at any given time. It shows quite clearly the relative decline of the Sunday Express. It shows that it was the Mirror and the Express which suffered most from the arrival of the Sun.

If people cannot read or understand graphs then really how are we expected to judge their opinions.

Herbert Thornton

Most of my 1.08am posting has gone missing or somebody has removed it. Is some hacker interfering with this blog? It actually read something like this -

"Clear Memories - Thank you for the explanation. I do try to keep up. However I very much doubt that the Dead Tree Press is 'the main former of public opinion' -

*ttp://www.thedeadtreepress.com/ "

TomTom

Trevors Den must be a civil servant he is financially clueless. Murdoch needs Sky Cashflow. With 34% he cannot consolidate casflow which is essential to service his leveraged empire

LibertarianLou

I don't think NOTW readers necessarily stupid (some of the brightest people I know enjoy a dose of celeb gossip now and again), nor is it a left vs right issue - the Spectator is far to right, surely, ideologically than the NOTW or the Sun? And so is the Daily Telegraph. But I have never seen anything in the Spectator that I would consider vindictive or hateful? It doesn't demonise people or encourage people to out and beat up paedophiles. It doesn't print pictures of benefit cheats or gypsies or fat people or people having a mental breakdown with nasty spiteful captions. It makes an economic case or social case for dealing with the related issues perhaps. But it doesn't dehumanise and encourage hatred.

Even aside from the law breaking and corruption charges, I think NOTW, the Sun, the Mirror, and indeed others like the Express and the Mail too are extremely unpleasant papers not for their ideological stance (as I say, the Spectator is further to the right but a brilliant read) but for their hateful manner.

This isn't to say I want any of this regulated. If people want to read it, and there's a market for it to support itself (clearly not the case for NOTW for whatever reason) then fine - but I still find it pretty nasty and wish those journalists would take a tiny bit more responsibility for who they are directing their hatred at.

outsider

Fraser, your charts are very illuminating about recent years but very misleading over the long run because you have not included newspapers that no longer exist or are no longer significant.

In the late 1940's, for instance, the Daily Herald (transformed into The Sun a couple of years before the Murdoch purchase) was selling more than 2 million a day, the News Chronicle 1 million and the Daily Graphic (of which the Daily Star is a tattered remnant) three quarters of a million. On Sundays, the People alone was selling 4.5 million while the Sunday Graphic and the Sunday Dispatch (the old Sunday version of the Daily Mail) had a combined 3.5 million.

If you add in these and others (including mass-circulation Manchester Sunday papers with national sales totalling more than 3 million)you can see that the total market has been in continuous decline since the immediate post-war boom. This has come in phases with television, local radio, Sky (for sports news) and now the internet.

You are right to be worried about a drastic shrinking of national newspaper titles because so many make continuous losses and now have no hope of becoming economic. To survive, whatever your internet model, you need a unique selling proposition and too few now have it.

Simon Stephenson.

outsider ; 3.25am

Quite correct. Lies, damn lies and statistics, eh.

Currently the only mass-producers of cars in the UK are Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, MINI, Nissan, Toyota and Vauxhall. Would tracking back 80 years looking at just the outputs of these manufacturers allow one to gain a meaningful picture of the ups and downs of UK car production over that period? I think not.

Derek Emery

News seems to be a loss making activity. Taking the average of the downwards slope since 1955 for the Sundays gives a prediction of only around 1-2 million readers per newspaper within 20 years. It is unlikely that all these newspapers will last this long particularly as advertising revenue will fall correspondingly. Probably the biggest news vehicle will be the BBC as it has no requirement to make a profit.