If you look at the Newspaper Society website you will find this release about regional press readership, which was posted last night. It tells you that in the last year regional papers have added 400,000 new readers and that the number of people who consumed 'any regional evening newspaper' has increased to 24% from 21%. If you then go to today's holdthefrontpage report you will see a faithful reproduction of that NS release with the addition of a sentence which reads: "Half-yearly ABC circulation figures, due out next week, are expected to show further falls."
You may be forgiven at that point for shaking your head, as I did. How can the circle be squared? With sales going down, why are the numbers of readers going up? Are more people reading each copy? No. Do the figures include website users? No. Have the figures been manipulated or massaged? Well, as far as I can ascertain, they haven't (though I'm unable to get hold of the raw data to check that). Indeed, the reason I'm posting this now - and held back on doing so last night - is because I've been trying to discover the magic by which declining circulations result in rising readership.
I have a tentative answer. It would appear that readership has been boosted dramatically by growing audiences for the free papers and free editions of paid-for titles. For example, the London Evening Standard's giveaway edition, Standard Lite, was included for the first time, perhaps accounting for 80,000 extra readers. I say perhaps because we come then to a further problem. Readership is not audited like sales. The figures are obtained through interviews with a representative sample of 25,000 people for the Target Group Index (TGI), an annual survey organised by the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). So it's very unlikely that the sample, despite the company's sophisticated measuring system, would throw up all the readers of frees across Britain. I readily accept that there is a margin of error built into such surveys and that a quirk of sampling might have thrown up more evening readers by chance. But 400,000 is a lot of margins and quirks!
As far as BMRB is concerned, it regards its methodology as straightforward and the resulting hard, empirical data as "robust", though a market researcher friend of mine - with a knowing wink - suggested that all such data is (and I love this phrase) "a flexible tool". Even so, I regard the Newspaper Society - despite its natural desire to see glasses half full rather than half empty - as a truth-telling industry body. So the central riddle remains.
According to the TGI findings (taken for the period from April 2005 to March this year), regional newspapers are now read by 83.7% of the UK population. Well, I have to say that I just don't buy that. I'd be delighted if it were true. I would break my self-imposed denial of alcohol (19 months and counting) if I genuinely thought 50,220,000 British people were reading local or regional papers.
We know that the UK population is increasing - beyond 60m, according to today's reports. But we also know that many of those people do not read British papers of any kind (because they don't even speak English). We also know that more and more people are turning to the net. Indeed, quite rightly, the regional press owners are continually improving their digital products in order to compensate for the loss of buyers for the print format. So there we are. I confess I'm baffled, and if anyone can throw more light on this, then let me know.
