NEWS
If a story in our city’s morning daily newspaper The Courier-Mail can be believed we should all give ourselves a pat on the back. Yes, it seems Brisbane residents are embracing recycling more than ever. Not content with filling our yellow-top bins to the brim each fortnight, we are doing a damn fine job recycling The Courier-Mail itself.
Last Saturday the paper broke the news that despite yet another drop in its circulation figures, its readership had risen – also yet again. It has become a ritual for the newspaper to claim readership is holding up or growing despite the long-term decline in its sales.
This can only mean one thing – those who shell out their cash to buy The Courier-Mail are thoughtfully passing it on to others to read. The newspaper’s story itself said The Courier-Mail’s average daily circulation Monday to Friday in the first quarter of 2011 was 195,490 and 278,313 for its Saturday weekend edition.
Oddly, they did not give any comparative figures for the same period last year. Maybe they didn’t want to bother readers with too many statistics. They usually have the same thoughtful attitude each time the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures appear.
But we can supply the comparative numbers for the March quarter 2010. They were 208,214 Monday to Friday and 300,830 on Saturdays. That means on average 12,724 people who bought the Courier in the first three months of 2010 were no longer buying it come the first three months of this year.
That means 6.1 per cent fewer papers being sold each day. Similarly, over the past year 22,517 people stopped buying the weekend edition of The Courier-Mail – a circulation drop of almost 7.5 per cent.
What the Courier’s own story last Saturday did say was that its readership on Mondays to Fridays had grown 2.2 per cent to reach 603,000.
So congratulations to the diminishing pool of Courier buyers for your outstanding generosity by passing on your copy to friends, family, neighbours or even perfect strangers.
Ann Brunswick
