Day: 16 February 2012

Nine fallers and four managed a gain in the latest JNRS released today.

The Irish Independent and the Mirror share the stage (probably for the first time), but both for very different reasons. The Mirrors accolade was that it grew 11% in readership year on year and on the other hand the Irish Independent lost 11% or 62,000 readers and drops below the half a million mark.

Also in the morning market, The Irish Times suffered a fall of nearly 9% to 310,000 readers per day. The Star dropped 12,000 and The Sun nearly managed to hang on to last year’s figure as did the Daily Mail. Then only title to see an increase in readership was the Examiner gaining 6,000.

The big faller (in percentage terms) was the Sunday Business Post losing nearly to one fifth of its readers and falling 33,000 to 154,000. Strictly in numerical terms, the Sunday Independent lost the highest amount at 67,000. Contrary to its (recent anyway) circulation direction, the Sunday Times was down 32,000 readers year on year. The Sunday Mirror, again like the circulation numbers, most likely capitalised on the demise of the News of the World putting on 42,000 to 418,000.

Just on that: in this survey last year the News of the World was recorded at reaching 15% of the population or 528,000 people every Sunday. So where have they all gone? Now, not all the Sunday papers are surveyed – but enough to make a reasoned judgement. The survey shows that, in the main, the old NoW readers have disappeared into the ether.

Based on the circulation and readership figures available after the closure, it’s my contention that the NoW was rarely a ‘primary purchase’ on a Sunday and that it made up just one of a “bundle” of papers read on the Sabbath! Once gone, it simply hasn’t been replaced by those old readers as none of them were tempted by the other titles to replace their NoW. Obviously some have turned to the Sunday Mirror, but certainly not in the volumes that the NoW once reached.

The Sunday World is a bit of a curious one. I’m sure that the powers that be in the Mirror Group would argue many reasons for their papers 30% rise, quality product, promotion etc, etc. But call a spade a shovel: the second biggest tabloid in the Sunday Market is no more, so there are bound to be benefactors of which the Sunday Mirror was certainly one. But one would have thought (before the fact) that the Sunday World would have been a natural substitution for the NoW and would be able to get a decent lift from the closure. It seems if that isn’t the case.

To conclude with a thought – could one, looking at the figures, argue that there is/was a market here for a strictly  ‘British Tabloid’?