Monday, July 24, 2017

Guardian Circulation, is there a web strategy?

I noticed Peter Preston mentioned circulation numbers on Sunday. Observer up 8.6 June on May, Guardian 3.8 . "while Tory-backing competitors stayed stagnant or slipped back. Not much of a market, it appears, for the drum beaters of pending Tory triumph".

Well, this sounds ok and explains why Labour did better with social media. Newspapers losing an edge.

But when I start looking for detail through the Press Gazette, things are worse still including the Guardian.

The Sun dropped 10.5 per cent to 1.6m sales a day, the Daily Mirror fell 17 per cent to 641,000 copies and the Sunday Mirror fell 20 per cent to 556,000.
The year-on-year declines may have been worsened by the increased interest in news in June 2016 around Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union.

Possibly the referendum editorial made a connection but the election was more nuanced.

Guardian down 7%, Observer 6%. Not as striking as the Mirror but not a good trend.

My guess is that the Mirror did not catch much Corbyn support as they were opposed most of this time. Guardian similar. So maybe most of the readership went online. Speculation obviously but facts will follow, especially if trends continue as this would suggest

( see another blog for even more opinionated post on recent journalism )

There must be some level of circulation at which the news operation is not viable. It may not be far off. They seem to concentrate on opinion or a package for news that readers know already from somewhere else.

Twitter / YouTube seems to work well as I find it. TV and radio clips now turn up for most events so you can make your own mind up on what was said.

Guardian still not putting much in print about what they intend to do online. There is much moaning about the web in general, especially Facebook and Google. But is the hard copy just going to complain till the circulation completely vanishes?

By the way there used to be circulation numbers published on the printed Guardian media pages but it seems to have gone completely today.


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