What do you do on a Sunday? Shop at Ikea, visit National Trust houses, take a trip to the seaside, host long luncheon parties, play sport (or watch your son/daughter playing)? Maybe you go to church. What's certain is that, unless you're a journalist, fewer of you are spending the day at home reading the papers. Nor, would I imagine, do many of you stay long - if at all - at your computer terminal, a significant point that I'll return to in a moment.
First the facts behind the collapse of the Sunday newspaper market, which is confirmed once again by the release of today's ABC figures. As the headline on Chris Tryhorn's piece says, it's a bloodbath. A gradual 30-year flight by readers is clearly turning into an exodus. To underline the claim, just compare the figures for last month compared to January 2004. Just three years ago, the 10 London-based national titles together sold 13,158,009 copies compared to 11,760,683 last month, a fall of 10.6%. Breaking that down, the red-top quartet sold 7,132,388 in 2004 compared to 6,026,866 last month (down 15.5%), while the four serious titles sold 2,731,464 then and 2,640,277 today (down 3.34%) and the middle-market pair sold 3,294,157 as against today's 3,093,540 (down 6.09%). Clearly, it's the popular market that's no longer so popular.
There are definitely cultural reasons for the decline in the Sunday market. The Sabbath is no longer a day of rest. People treat it instead as a leisure opportunity, which usually means getting out of the house for one of the reasons I mentioned above. Newsagents often close soon after lunch. The size of papers, and their cost, mean that fewer people than ever buy more than one title. Sport, one of the major reasons for the once-disproportionate male audience for Sunday papers, is covered in detail on a variety of TV channels and, anyway, football matches are now spread out over the weekend and beyond.
All that having been said, the reason I've lighted on the Sunday newspaper decline as opposed to that of the dailies (which is happening at a slower rate), is that it throws up interesting questions about the lack of interest in papers specifically and news in general. I take on board the fact that the red-top Sundays hardly touch on the mainstream news agenda, and it's a long time since they have, so their 15.5% three-year sales plunge cannot be anything to do with that.
But it's also the case, surely, that people are not accessing online news on Sundays either. If they bother at all, they probably rely on TV for news that day. Of more interest though - given the nature of the content of the News of the World (itself down by more than 15% in three years) and its rivals, the Sunday Mirror, People, and Daily Star on Sunday - is the obvious lack of enthusiasm for their scandalous tittle-tattle about celebrities.
Their editors may say - well, they do say - that serious stuff doesn't sell. So they pump out what they think sells best, meaning the trivial stuff. And they can't really lay the blame on their sales slumps on rise of the internet. As I noted above, on Sundays the use of newspaper sites, and all news sites, is very low indeed. Furthermore, it is not a case of people preferring to pick up freesheets in place of their paid-fors. There are some Sunday free titles around the country, but the volume is too low to have much of an effect.
So the point I'm making is that newspapers, regardless of the net, are going out of fashion in Britain. For many people, not just the young, buying papers is becoming a casual or marginal decision. It's no longer an ingrained habit. As home delivery falls, as it has in many areas, both rural and urban, newspaper sales will go on falling. The die is cast.
Incidentally, for all those pundits who like to say that selling 11.7m national papers a day in a population of 60m isn't such a bad performance in a mature industry, consider this. If the decline continues at its present rate over the next three years, that total sale will have gone down to below 10m. But the decline has speeded up, so that's a conservative estimate. Will everyone still be saying there's no reason to suspect the worst?
