Each round of newspaper circulation figures makes grim reading for anyone trying to balance the books at a newspaper. Month after month circulation is dropping away across the board. The usual explanation is that newspapers are suffering because so much free news is now available online, and there is certainly a large degree of truth in that.
However, there are two important caveats to that. First, the massive lack of trust in journalists, who are regularly rated one of the least trusted professions in the UK. As I wrote last year on this topic,
Isn’t a major reason that people increasingly turn elsewhere for news that they don’t trust the quality of what comes from traditional and paid-for sources enough above those other sources? “Pay for news from us because it’ll be accurate” could be a good sell. If people trust you.
(As an aside, it looks as if this his how The Times is trying to position itself compared to The Telegraph, with The Times‘s rather more balanced political coverage during the general election and since. The Times was in a very different league from The Telegraph with stories such as its misleadingly truncated data, page 1 splash despite admitting not knowing the truth or double-standards on tax.)
The second caveat is that though newspaper circulations are dropping, many magazines carrying news and current affairs are seeing circulations rise, as was the case with the latest ABC circulation figures – and this was no flash in the pan as it’s the continuation of an existing trend.
So is the problem people’s unwillingness to pay for news, or is it that newspapers are stuck in the wrong format and wrong styles?
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14 Comments
1-Many people now get their news on-line as it is a. free and b. easier to access c. archive-able and d. doesn’t create trash
2-There are so many free paper newspapers now one hardly has to buy a newspaper if all you want is a quick break down of the latest headlines
3-The Y generation turn less to traditional print journalism for news and seek alternate sources such as online and tv. They being a substantially larger generation then the X generation it’s not hard to see how their buying power influences certain things. As the war and baby boomer generations die off they are the probably the generation with the most influence in the market place at the moment.
4-You are very correct in saying that people do not trust traditional journalists. Increasingly journalism has become about opinion and less about news, people are turning more toward those they trust for an opinion or for places where the news still means just the facts.
These are just my observations
For me personally a weekly magazine (in my case the Economist) is a better and more convenient format than a daily newspaper. I rarely read a daily newspaper cover-to-cover, but I always do with my magazines. Also, a lot of the daily newspapers are now taken up with generally uninteresting magazine and lifestyle supplements rather than actual news. Surely if people want these there are plenty of seperate magazines they can subscribe to?
With TV, radio and internet all offering faster coverage of breaking stories, daily newspapers can no longer compete on timeliness. The sole advantage of print media is reflection and the potential to focus on quality, which is naturally easier for a weekly, fortnightly or monthly magazine than a daily newspaper.
Can get away with reading the internet at work, not so much with reading a newspaper, honestly I’ve tried. Commuting by car I can’t read it there, and doing so at home is pretty antisocial. Newspapers don’t fit with my life; it’s not that I don’t pay for content, it’s just I only have time for it delivered in a convenient way.
The problem is that it is often the worst stories and the worst headlines that sells the most newspapers.
The Daily Mail song says it all;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI
I think it has to be the case that these tabloids do market research and they know what sells. Not long ago the tabloids were extensively reporting on Madelaine McCann and often in a very hypocritical way, simply because the story boosted sales.
The long term trends are down of course. It would be interesting to know how many people are not interested in the news and why. It would be interesting to know what the consequences of not knowing the news is for those who fall into that category.
Calling magzines ‘current affairs’ and comparing them to newspapers as sources of news is, i think, slightly misleading: most of the top-selling magazines of the ‘current affairs’ variety provide in-depth analysis and comment of some kind, e.g. the Economist or Prospect. People may just find that reported news is easy to get for free on the internet, whereas good comment isn’t (no offence to LDV…).
All these newspapers put accurate informative reporting way behind axe-grinding for a political agenda that is hostile to mine. It would be ludicrous for me to buy any of them.
Reducing circulation of newspapers means few people reading anti-LibDem news so as LibDems we should welcome the trend. Sadly, as newspapers scrabble for readership, they do not care what they print so long as it sells papers. One recent sinister development is the microscopic slicing of news e.g. the England football manager gave an honest answer to a question about David Beckham, which caused a storm in the press nad overshadowed any sensible discussion about teh quality of England’s performance in the recent friendly against Hungery. Then people wonder why politicians do not tell the truth.
For me it is a problem of two halves. Firstly, the BBC, ITV and Channel4 have good TV, radio and internet news which is free at the point of use. To get people to pay for news or opinion, you have to offer something far better than what is currently on offer, which brings me to the second half of the problem. News papers are full of biased opinions, twisted facts and often not far short of lies to fabricate shocking headlines whose purpose is not to inform but merely to generate sales of news print. Its no wonder journalists call their work “stories”.
I’d happily pay for decent news which was unbiased and factual, but these two things appear to have no place in today’s newspaper reportage.
The tendency to push their own agendas and to try their best to create shocking sensationalist articles, their willingness to mislead and misinform, and the gall to claim that they do it for our benefit is what stops me buying any newspaper out there. Yes there may be one or two good ones, but I’m unwilling to try and find one, the majority have ruined it for the minority with me, I have other sources and I now don’t need or want newspapers. The only exception I make is to read the local newspaper if I happen to visit my parents.
I agree with Niklas – if I want insight and intellectual challenge I read the Economist. Newspapers are packed with:
– spin masquerading as news (often the paper’s own spin)
– ranting “opinion” from people who I’d like to slap
– vacuous “lifestyle” pieces which I can rarely read without a sense of disgust
@Chris Keating
“people who I’d like to slap”
“vacuous lifestyle pieces”
Had to laugh. Total agreement, here!
The problem with charging for on line copy is that you cannot put it back if it isn’t worth buying. Nor can you get your money back if you find that all the articles are rubbish. Most journalists only produce a decent article once in a while, much of the time it is predictable tat.
On sites such as this instead of providing a link, commentators and bloggers will simply have to summarise the main points if they feel a need to react to an artilcle.
While I agree with many of the comments above about why newspapers are largely digging their own graves in terms of appealing to a increasingly more decerning audience – I would also like to point out that the idea that “people are unwilling to pay for news” is a bit misleading – no-one ever pays for news in a newspaper.
The cover price of a newspaper typically only covers the cost of printing and distribution – and in many cases not even that. The content itself is and always has been paid for by the advertisers. This is the great folly behind paywalls and the current meme that the public needs to “taught to pay for news again” – we never paid in the first place!
Memory tells me that an exit poll after the 2005 general election, grouping voters by their chosen newspaper, Times readers best reflected the election result. (The Guardian readers were the most polarised, no Tories at all.)