That racy tabloid from Rupert Murdoch’s stable, The Courier-Mail, continues to shed buyers at a steady rate. But there may be a solution – or two. More on that a little later.
First of all, the downward trend in circulation is an industry-wide and worldwide one, thanks to free content on the internet. Only a handful of traditional newspapers have seen their circulation figures climb in recent years According to the most recent statistics comparing circulation performance from October to December for both 2011 and 2010, circulation of The Courier-Mail from Monday to Friday is now well under the 200,000 mark at just more than 192,000 – a drop of 4.3 per cent over the year from almost 202,000.
Circulation for the paper’s Saturday edition dropped almost 6 per cent and is now down to just under 261,000 compared with almost 276,000 a year ago. Sure, a drop of 5 to 6 per cent is not good, but sounds relatively small, doesn't it? But think back just five or so years when the figures were showing weekday circulation of almost 225,000 and almost 327,000 on Saturdays.
The chilling fact is every year Murdoch’s monopoly metro daily in Brisbane is shedding whole suburbs of readers unwilling to fork out even the small change it costs to buy it.
One bright light in the latest circulation figures for Mr Murdoch is the performance of his daily Darwin paper, the Northern Territory News. Its circulation managed to stay steady over the past year at slightly more than 19,000 on weekdays, and climbed ever so slightly by 0.4 per cent on Saturdays to hover around 20,700. Maybe those in charge up at The Courier-Mail could take a leaf out of their Darwin colleagues’ book and put a few more crocodile stories on the front page. It surely couldn’t hurt.
Here’s another thought. It may sound crazy and it’s not directed only at our own Courier-Mail in its declining health.
But I can’t help thinking that if newspapers actually reported news, then more people might buy them. Instead of breathlessly recycling tales of who is in or out of the current hot TV reality show, or trying to be a print version of website gossip columns, newspapers might reverse the downward trend in their sales if they contained something worth buying and which can’t be found for free on the internet. Just a thought.
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One of the biggest drops in circulation listed in the latest official figures was sustained by the Sunday Mail. I am certain the paper would have published a story to tell you about it, but a quick flick through recent editions did not turn it up. Perhaps I need to look harder.
Over the past year the Sunday Mail’s circulation fell 7.2 per cent from almost 499,000 copies to just more than 463,000. This downward trend seems to put the lie to the theory that even in competition with internet news sources, non-daily hard-copy papers could maintain their audiences by offering good quality reporting and features. Uh, oh. I think I spot the flaw in that argument as it applies to the Sunday Mail.
What truly amazes me about the plunging circulation of both of our city’s major newspapers is that even as fewer and fewer are buying them, the papers themselves continue to lift their advertising rates. Of course they base that on their alleged rising “readership”.
Such figures often magically show that fewer papers in circulation are somehow being read by more people.
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In the recently ended phony election campaign both the Labor Government of Anna Bligh and the LNP led by Campbell Newman tried to outdo each other when it came to promising extra value for holders of Translink Go Cards.
The government has introduced a system where if you make 10 journeys in a week and get the rest of your travel in that week free. Mr Newman has offered a nine-journey trigger for free travel. But according to one of my colleagues, people are already getting free trips out of their Go Cards. Apparently when they know they are make a long-haul journey across many of the Translink zones, they make sure they use their unregistered Go Card when it has a minimal cash balance – far less than required to pay for their trip. Then they hop on board a train and at the other end of their journey, touch off and just throw the card away. No need for complicated or well-costed election policies for them, apparently.
