Little cheer for newspapers
I wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t noticed the latest regional newspaper circulation figures – there was certainly nothing to shout for newspaper publishers here in Wales.
Three of the Wales’s six daily titles suffered double-digit year-on-year declines, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The South Wales Echo in Cardiff was down 11.8% year on year to an average sale of 39,361 in the first six months of 2009, while the South Wales Evening Post, fell 10.1% to 46,069.
The Western Mail was down 11.4% year on year, the morning paper slipping to an average sale of 32,926. The slowest rate of decline in Wales was seen at another Trinity Mirror title, the Daily Post, which was down 5.3% year on year to 33,938.
I could go into a diatribe of: ‘I remember when we used to sell 20 million papers a day etc etc etc’ but I won’t – the fact is, newspapers have been in decline, dare I say it, terminal decline for decades.
Consultants have collectively been paid millions of pounds to work out why this decline has happened and what can be done to stop it.
Not so long ago, the predominant reason given was time-famine, that we are all too busy these days to read a paper. But that doesn’t square with the fact that more and more of us are spending more and more time playing video games or surfing social network sites on the PC or laptop.
The fact is we do have the time, but we are not choosing to use it reading a newspaper.
And that has created huge problems for the companies which own our newspapers because declining readerships mean advertisers are more and more adverse to spending their cash on vehicles which are not reaching so many of their key target customers – the consumers.
And so now we are back to the world of consultants and analysts. If we accept that the newspaper is indeed in terminal decline, the issue now is how to get more advertisers onto the net, and how to get them paying the premium which they happily paid for newspaper advertisments in the past, but are less keen to do online.
Most of us have happily migrated to reading our news online instead of print, and the readership of online news sites has rocketed in the past 12 months. If the consultants and analysts can finally solve the online advertising conundrum then all of our favourite newspapers will surely have suffered their coupe de grace.
Tags: advertising, circulation, internet news, Newspapers, online advertising, online news, regional newspapers, Wales
