You really wouldn’t have to be working on algorithms to predict what was going to happen this month. November normally brings with it a slight dip in newspaper purchases, but this year’s seems to have been fairly dramatic for some publications. The Tabloids dropped over 4,000 copies collectively with the Mirror (-1,800) and the Daily Star (-1,433) sharing most of that drop. The latter has now, for the first time in its fairly illustrious history, dropped sub 70,000. Over the years many of the Star journeys brought them into unchartered waters, and to great success in many cases, this circulation

What a difference a month can make and I’d particularly focus on the tabloid section of the Morning market in that statement. September was a good (enough) month for the tabloids especially as the hurlers took two bites of the apple. The Daily Star used those events to do a bit of price promotion and managed to maintain its numbers in September.   However, October has been a disaster for the Red Tops: The Sun fell 4% to 68,696 – the paper never having been in the 60’s – and the Daily Star stayed this side of it by only

I alluded to this on a couple of occasions before in this pixelated version of reality. Running two editions of a newspaper – one broadsheet and one compact, is a risk free but expensive decision. On one hand you let the market decide which format they prefer by giving them the choice of both formats and offending no-one. But in doing so you double up on your subbing (no a whold lot), layout, pre-press, plates, printers wages and have two shorter print runs as opposed the one run straight through. All well and good when the tiger roared, but in

Starting with the tabloids as it, historically, is a decent month for them. But not for all of them as The Sun took a hit of some 1,100 month on month. The Mirror was down 800 and the Daily Star just maintained the previous months figure.  Perhaps this was due in part to the finals of the Football and Hurling and offering the supporters a promotion on their home turf. The Daily Star targeted the Mayo, Donegal, Galway and Kilkenny population with a €1 “to celebrate” (an all to clichéd phrase) their county reaching the All Ireland Finals – Kilkenny

Nothing beats a bit of decent competition. It ups the ante for all concerned. The salient part of the first sentence was the word “decent”. We’re not asking for strict Queensbury rules here, actually we’ve always advocated a more “Dan Donnelly” approach to the pugilist’s art. With obviously not enough on their plates (like declining sales, declining advertising revenue, no digit strategy to speak of etc) the papers in the People Republic have taken to handbags and their ring is in the pages of the complaints process of the ABC. Five of the last regional newspaper complaints to the ABC

The Morning tabloids showed a rise in circulation, mainly due to the strength of the Mirror, although The Sun and Star had small increases as well. Surprisingly, there was only one faller month on month – the Daily Mail. This is counter balanced by the fact that there were only two papers to show and increase year on year.   The tabloids are down over 30,000 in the past twelve months and the total morning market is down 34,000 in the year. The Sunday Sun continues to disappoint on the sales front dropping 5,600 on the month. It’s really not

Although the evening market is really just two local papers at different corners of the country – they still have to be covered. With the market as it is, the Evening Herald did well to more or less retain last year’s numbers. The introduction of the Dubliner magazine on Thursdays and the ability to grab headlines (Herald was all over Sky news today as it published pictures of Prince Harry in Vegas) seems to be working     Publication JJ 2012 JJ 2011 Diff ‘000 Diff % Evening Herald   61,179 61,936 -757 -1% Echo 17,556 20,011 -2,455 -12% Total  78,735