NEWS
The latest official figures show that the two main Brisbane metropolitan papers – The Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail – appear incapable of halting a downward spiral in both circulation and readership.
Latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show that in the first three months of this year, The Courier Mail’s Monday to Friday sales stood at 187,897,a drop of 3.9 percent on the correspondingn period last year. Readership as gauged by Roy Morgan Research stood at 552,000, a whopping 8.5 per cent drop. The daily paper’s Saturday edition sold 255,520 in the first three months of 2012 down a massive 8.2 per cent year on year. Readership year on year was 715,000, a drop of 8.7 per cent.
But that was nothing compared with the reasdership slump for its sister paper, the Sunday Mail. The survey showed 1,093,000 people were reading away, a 10.6 per cent drop on the year. Sales stood at 461, 668, a 6.4 percent drop year on year.
Now all these plummetung figures are very very enlightening to advertisers, so it’s really great that theyand their agencies get such information from the source. They’d be left in the dark if they relied on reading about these results in both papers.
The editors of both mastheads have once again gone down familiar paths in dealing with bad news, with the Courier-Mail following the lead of some other dailies in recent times by trumpeting where the paper standsin terms of national sales.
“Still on top for news” is also a heading the Bowen Hills based daily can probably keep using ‘til the end of time – well, the end of newspapers – on the basis that even if the paper over the next quarter century slumped to a circulation of several hundred and with a readership to match, it would still be the state’s top newspaper, outstrippng the Barcoo Bugle by some dozens.
Tumpeting the fact that the Courier is still the third-highest selling masthead nationwide seems a reasonable boast at first glance. But coming third as the only newpspaer in the nation’s third largest city - and the only one that’s actually growing well - maybe is a rather meaingless boast when you think about it.
They did mention the basic figures for the most reent quarter, but ignored completely the earlier figures or what that meant in terms of decline. This newspaper has been critical on many occasions as to the ethics of doing this.
The Sunday Mail did the only sensible thing when both readership and circulation showed big drops. They ignored the story completely. Maybe their colleague in the daily editorial office would have been wise to have done the same thing. Thinking up new ways to fudge figures every three months must be bloody exhausting.
