Have colour supplements lost their allure? Will the long slide of the two Expresses ever end? Has the Sunday Times stalled? Who'll win the daily broadsheet battle? Questions with a touch of prophecy.
There are two ways of charting newspaper fortunes. One is through copy sales and thus the ABC-audited circulation figure. Proceed with caution: giveaways and cut-price wheezes can blur your vision. The other (via the National Readership Survey) measures readers, not sales. Proceed with a different kind of caution. The NRS, in effect, is an ongoing poll. All polls have a margin of error. They need to be read carefully for shifts that make sense - usually in conjunction with other data (like ABC statistics). If you do that at the start of this bruising autumn, you may glimpse some fascinating things.
Real ABC winners at the end of July were few and far between. Only the Mail and FT among the dailies sold more than 1 per cent extra in the six months from February 2000 than in the same period of 1999. Only the Observer among general interest Sundays showed clear gains.
But that's what has happened : Readership trends, by contrast, hint at what is happening . Take, for maximum prudence, the latest available NRS year of results (July 1999 to June 2000) and stack them against the previous year. Some movements are clear. Internet usage, for instance, marches on. Last year the Times had the highest number of daily readers who claimed to have wandered the web some time in the previous 12 months (944,000): this year the Telegraph has just overtaken it (1.086 million to 1.08 million). Right across the broadsheet board, though, the net looms larger: from almost three-quarters of Guardian readers to just under half of Telegraph ones.
Circulation blight to come? Perhaps. Readership everywhere but the FT is falling, and that's usually a predictor of falling sales. But there are other devils in other details. Colour magazines are fading a little. Only the Guardian Weekend (just) can claim more readers than it did last year. Even the Daily Mail 's own formidable Weekend is 25,000 readers down. On Sundays, only the Independent on Sunday 's Review is steady and only the Mail 's Night and Day shows any increase.
That could be thought-provoking news for familiar packages such as the Sunday Times . Both The Magazine and The Culture have lost readers, while Style is off 118,000 year on year. Bring back Tara Palmer-Tomkin son? They will surely need to bring something back: readership for the whole package has dropped from 3.33 million to 3.24 million (tracking a tiny fall in copy sales). It isn't remotely a crisis: but it is beginning to be a challenge.
Such challenges, meanwhile, grow harder where the morning broadsheets live. You can chart their struggles in the differences between faithful readers who take a single paper of choice and those who tend to roam, following the interests of the moment from front page to front page. When loyalties soften at the edges, there's opportunity for gain and, of course, for loss.
And loyalties do seem to be softening. Last year 16 per cent of Independent readers also read the Telegraph and Guardian, respectively. This year that figure is up to 21 per cent in both cases. Guardian solus readership has weak ened against the Times , Telegraph and Indy by two or three points. The Times is more vulnerable to the Guardian and Telegraph .
The strongest of the four - very marginally - is the Telegraph , which has only seen 1 per cent of its readership begin to stray; and that fits well with a total readership record for the 12 months, down just 2,000 (to 2.39 million). But there's still not much for Conrad Black's comfort in the age profile figurings. The daily has 86,000 fewer readers between 15 and 44 than it did - and 58,000 more over 65. The graveyard bind continues to operate.
Graveyards are a worry for the Daily and Sunday Express , too. In context, the readership falls - 48,000 on the daily, 86,000 on the Sunday - aren't particularly horrifying. (The Sunday Telegraph , for instance, is off 96,000). There's some evidence that the battling Rosie Boycott is shifting the daily profile to readers aged between 34 and 64, with some gains there and a slight drop in the over 65s. But that's still 28 per cent of the readership - only a point less than the Telegraph , and double the Guardian/Times/Independen t norm. Circulation figures, down 2.75 per cent year on year, won't respond while the readership drifts. Staying over a million copy sales looks tougher than ever.
Where are the young readers going, then? Maybe to the net, maybe to Associated's Metro freesheets, but certainly to the Daily Mail , which has 95,000 more readers between 15 and 34 to shout about. The Mail formula isn't infallible - the Mail on Sunday can't match big brother's gains - but it's hard not to see women as a vital part of the mix. The sex profile of readers remains a rock steady 50-50(as opposed to 57-43 for the Guardian and 62-38 for the Times ). Women readership on the four main broadsheets together is down 272,000, with a parallel Sunday blight.
Health warnings again: some of these samplings, and thus some of the conclusions, are assuredly wobbly. Follow the pattern, not a precise path. But you can still, I think, hear the autumn cry of embattled editors. Bring me young recruits, and, please, try to make them young women.
