Rupert Murdoch, Flickr
When the sales of printed newspapers fell dangerously low this year, News Corp Australia made a monumental decision. Did they decide to stop publishing newspapers? Well, not quite. They decided to stop publishing circulation figures. The decision means we will never again know how many copies of each paper they sell.
What was to be the final set of bad figures was handed down in August. The Audit Bureau of Circulation, which independently audits newspaper sales, reported circulation drops of more than 10% in some cases. The Australian, which calls itself the “heart of the nation” sold 94,448 copies a day, down from 99,027 at the same time the previous year. The Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph reported a circulation of 221,996, down from 233,546 at the same time last year. The Herald Sun, the top-selling Monday to Friday publication in the stable, fell almost 10% to 303,140. The Daily Telegraph weekday edition fell below 230,000 for the first time – to 221,641 – and the Sunday Telegraph fell below 400,000 for the first time.
The ABCs, as they are known, have always provided a reliable measure for advertisers who will pay according to the number of eyeballs and the demographic they are targeting. But every time they are published the figures paint a gloomy picture. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm suddenly withdrew its newspapers from the Audited Media Association of Australia, which publishes the ABCs, a move which effectively ends the transparent auditing of printed papers in this country.
Perhaps the newspaper business is getting a makeover ahead of Murdoch’s sale of $66bn worth of 21st Century Fox’s assets, including a Hollywood film studio and a 39% stake in Sky. Industry expert and Mumbrella publisher, Tim Burrowes, says pulling out of the ABCs is a way of burying increasingly bad news about the long slow decline of print.
“It’s disappointing because it means less transparency but was probably inevitable,” Burrowes told Weekly Beast. “It’s easy to understand why a publisher doesn’t want to spend thousands of dollars a year promoting what has tended to be a cavalcade of bad news about fading copy sales. Some advertisers will be upset but this is also on them. If the industry had demanded and rewarded transparency in the first place then we might not be where we are.”
News Corp will now rely on a measurement it created with other publishers back in 2013: Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (Emma) which promotes readership numbers, rather than circulation, as the key metric and is based on asking survey questions. News Corp says the circulation figures are “no longer a representative measure of today’s cross-platform audiences”.
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Amanda Meade, Guardian
