What’s trending, come election time: the rise or fall of the national debt, of school success and hospital failure, of politicians’ broken promises and malign newspaper influence? Trends seem to nail the future for you.
So it’s natural, and instructive, to take the facts and figures of newspaper circulation (from the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation returns) and use them to answer two questions. If the underlying story of print decline and digital growth continues, what will Fleet Street look like in five and 10 years’ time? (Will it even exist?) And the “Tory press”: how will that stand two elections down the line? Prepare for a little future shock.
I’ve used the six-monthly average figures from February’s ABCs to get a more balanced take, and I’ve rounded up or down the percentages they show. What about bulks, misty overseas distribution and all the grey arts of circulation managers? No allowances made: this is rough trade figuring. But the basic points are sharp enough.
The Sun ended February with an average print sale of 1,941,000 a day – some 9% down on the same six-month period last year. So if that rate of decline continues on trend, it will be selling just over 1.2m in five years and around 760,000 in 10.
The Mirror had a 922,000 record in February and a percentage decline of 7%. Make that 640,000 in five years and 450,000 in 10. The Mail – with Paul Dacre retired at last, I guess – is sliding currently by only 5%. That gives it 1,280,000 or so in five years and a 990,000-ish figure in 10: add a few bulks to keep the million.
Print may have less and less economic clout, but it will still have some headline salience as the ballot boxes open
Upmarket a bit, the Telegraph has a 493,000 print figure and a 9% decline rate: so just over 307,000 in 2020 and 190,000 in 2025. The Guardian, on 179,000, posts a decline of 10%: so 105,000 in five years and 62,000 in 10. The Independent, at 61,103 now, can anticipate 38,000 and then 22,000. And the Times, with only a 2% decline record, will see its current 393,000 head towards 320,000 over a decade.
There’ll be casualties, of course. That 22,000 Indy figure is not far from the 16,000 bulks the paper gives away already. I haven’t included the FT because, sliding at 9%, the 36,000 copies it sells at full rate in Britain and Ireland won’t amount to a row of beans: think full transition to subscriptions online and digital triumph instead.
Of course compensatory digital growth is a factor. The Mail, the Guardian, the Mirror, the Telegraph and (perhaps) the Indy are all showing great growth rates there. But how does global coverage on mobile weigh against thunderous editorials in print as the ballot boxes open? When will the broadcasters mount a morning roundup of online opinion? Print may have less and less economic clout, but it will still have some headline salience as the campaigns get going.
There’ll be a residual Bun booming away. There’ll be a Mail with almost a million buyers to keep it warm (along with astronomic visitor numbers on the net). There’ll be the Times, still topping 300,000, and a Telegraph fighting to get back over 200,000. Politically, a mass-circulation Mirror without much mass doesn’t seem much of an answering voice for Labour: and, as for the Guardian, determined to become a worldwide liberal champion on the back of formidable digital investment, does 60,000 copies a day at home constitute continuing print viability?
Keep the caveats coming, of course. Pricing policies, which have driven so much of the decline, could change. The internet is not some stable, steady state; any number of technical developments could have transformed it by 2025. There’s no consistency to the variations papers record within an overall decline of 7.6% a year. Anything can, and probably will, change.
But the stated determination of some owners –Murdoch, Rothermere, the Barclays – to hang on in print for as long as possible extends more than a token future there, and possibly a critical mass of largely rightwing opinion that will still have political clout. The squeeze comes at the other end of the spectrum. Will it be possible, before 2025, to abandon print and complete transition to a digital future that underpins editorial resource with clear profitability? Nothing, alas, is quite that clear. Those few transitions attempted so far, from Seattle to Des Moines to Reading, feature much-diminished reporting resources and thin trickles of money: they could be dying falls, not bold leaps into a new world.
It’s all work in progress, of course. It means – on the strength of last 10 years. never mind the next 10 – a future full of convulsions. But at least it’s worth gathering the statistics and bending the trends before they bend back to surprise you.
■ Mathew Ingram of influential website Gigaom is a terrific prophet and pundit. He told the New York Times how painfully slowly it was going digital only a couple of weeks ago. But next week? There’ll be no Ingram because there’s no Gigaom. After nine years, the great blogging network has run out of cash and folded all unawares. No one, including Ingram, saw it coming.
No one said that top bloggers had to join bigger all-singing, all-dancing sites now because blogworld is collapsing faster than print. But that’s the harshest cyberspace law of the lot. What goes up, soon comes down again: falling fast.