NEWS
Question: what becomes more expensive the less you have of it? Sure, precious metals is a good answer? You up the back? Oil. That’s a good one. Anyone else? Another answer is, of course, newspaper advertising rates that go always go up when circulations decline.
For as long as this paper has been publishing, it has taken our city’s mainstream mastheads to task for often very selective reporting on their circulation figures that gauge their success and an important stat for potential advertisers to ponder before forking out the outrageous sums The Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail demand as monopolies for their display advertising space. Sadly the company that runs these papers has a pretty sorry record of cherrypicking these quarterly figures to show them in the best possible light. Maybe cherry picking is the wrong word. When really bad results fall from the Audit Bureau of Circulations tree, they are left to rot well out of the public eye.
Take the latest figures just released, for the three months to the end of 2011, and the comparisons with the same period a year before. Sadly the reasonably recent new editor at The Courier-Mail has quickly learnt how to polish these fruity little results for best possible consumption. Which is rather a pity for in his early tenure, he showed a commendable openness about how to report such things. Not any more.
“Still state’s top news choice” was how his Page 2 heading on 11 February explained away the latest sales figures for both his Monday to Friday and Saturday issues. The Courier-Mail was still the nation’s third highest daily circulation, he crowed. He mentioned the raw sales figures but not the fact that both were down – 4.5 per cent Monday to Friday and almost 6 percent on Saturday.
The editor at the sister paper The Sunday Mail ignored the results altogether. They showed a 7.2 per cent decline over the year. We say “ignored” because we couldn’t find them anywhere in the Sunday edition after the figures came out. To be fair, he might have run them on Page 129 of a 128-page country edition.
Now, to carry the fruit analogy a step further you might ask: isn’t it fair enough for a fruiterer to display his shiniest and freshest apples at the top. Might not be totally fair on the customer who finds a few mushy ones in the bag when they get home, but it’s human nature, right?
But as we have pointed out many times, these papers are not fruit and vegie sellers. Part of their job is to report without fear or favour on how businesses are faring – to record their ups and downs – and even take them to task if they hide from their shareholders unpalatable news.
The Courier-Mail editorial hierarchy regularly berates politicians and others for “spinning” the facts. Shonky business operators fleecing funds from the innocent through the use of selective performance indicators are deservedly exposed, named and shamed.
But when it comes to their own performance in the marketplace, every quarter they show they can spin circulation and readership stats with the best of them. In addition, the way the figures are reported or ignored must surely violate the supposed wall between the commercial and editorial interests of the papers. We think News Queensland, the parent company of these two mastheads, thus has a moral and ethical duty to report their circulation figures in an open and transparent manner. To show the fruits of their labours, blemishes and all.
It’s the decent and honourable thing to do and besides, do they really think that ad agencies and the like don’t pore over these statistics? And they do have a monopoly so can anyone really hurt them too much? The way they keep putting up their rates suggests not.
Probably the most galling aspect of how these editors use these results is that we can bet our bottom dollar that if the readership figures that generally come out about the same time had shown, for whatever miracle reason, a rise in readership numbers, then they’d gladly have shouted about the quality of their produce with absolutely no hesitation in making taste-test comparisons from the past. It’s quite pathetic, really.
