There have been forecasts about the gradual sales decline turning at some time in the future into a cliff fall. That claim has made me smile of late. Don't people know what a cliff looks like? We're already on the cliff face and have been for ages. Doesn't anyone get it? There is no recovery, no way of clambering back up. The four daily red-tops are now selling fewer than 6m between them when we all know that just one of them once sold 5m alone.
Then look at the rest of the dailies and compare the figures for October this year with October 2005. With the exception of the Daily Mail (see my separate posting) and the Financial Times, which is enjoying something of a British renaissance aside from its international growth, every paper has lost sales. Minus signs dominate. It's largely the same on Sundays, though the report by Stephen Brooks rightly points to special reasons for the Sunday Times's fall and a possible reason for The Observer's rise. Even those giveaways DVDs aren't really having much impact any longer. In truth, the Sunday cliff fall is steeper than that of the dailies.
But, having said all that, let's be honest: this newsprint circulation stuff just isn't worth the paper it's no longer written on, if you get my drift. Here I am reading the ABC newspaper sales figures on a computer screen - as I have done for years - telling me the same old story: papers aren't selling as well as they used to. But I know, as you who are reading this undoubtedly do too, that millions of people in Britain and, most importantly, elsewhere in the world are reading our journalistic efforts on their screens.
It's a joke that we're still awaiting the compilation of integrated figures to reveal the true story about our successes as multi-media news organisations. Months ago I was urging regional newspaper managers and editors to "preach the reach" (thank you, John Meehan, editor of the Hull Daily Mail, for reminding me). Yet none of us, whether on national, regional or local papers, can tell people about the genuine audience reach we are achieving via our various platforms unless the industry swiftly agrees a form of audit (or sampling) in order to produce a coherent monthly picture of our true position.
It won't stop our newsprint sales falling. But it will show that our work is reaching people and convince advertisers that our online efforts are worth supporting. It will certainly boost morale among journalists rather than continuing to depress them with an old tale about old media. Younger staff have never known the exhilarating pleasure of working for a paper that is on the rise. It puts a spring in the step. Instead, they have been clinging on to that cliff face, wondering whether there's any point to carrying on. Yet their work is reaching many more people than the ABC figures suggest.
