THE PRESS
Penny foolish
BILL GRUNDY
If you're a reader of the Daily Sketch, you may have noticed something different about it lately, quite apart from the marked liberal-, isation of the paper's editorial policy. Up there, in the top right hand corner of page one, is a small black rectangle. It carries a figure and a letter. The figure is '5' and the letter is 'd'. It is, of course, the Sketch's way of making quite clear to the waiting world that, alone of the popular papers, it is the one which hasn't put up its price from 5d to 6d in the last week or so.
Now it's a matter of fact that in recent years just about every increase in the price of a newspaper has been followed by a fall in its, circulation, if only temporarily. The Financial Times is the outstanding exception, of course, but then the FT is an exception to almost everything anyway, so we can ignore it and look at what effect, if any, price riles have had on the circulations of other papers.
The reluctance of the British public to pay as much for its daily paper as it does for a rotten cup of tea in a scruffy cafe is really quite modern. This, being his centenary year, is a good time to point out that when Charles Dickens's paper, the Daily News, first came out in 1846, it sold at 5d, which must be worth about 5s today. And yet the Daily News is still described in the reference books as 'the first cheap English newspaper'.
The abolition of the stamp duty on news- papers, which followed soon after the found- ing of the Daily News, meant that cheaper papers appeared on the scene almost immedi- ately, and yet even they were selling at prices which in today's terms would be between is and 2s a copy. It wasn't until Harmsworth's id Daily Mail appeared on the news stands in 1896 that really cheap papers came into being, at least on a large scale. Since then their cheapness has bedevilled an awful lot of things, and has meant that newspaper pro- prietors have never been ab1e to charge a reasonable price for their products, which leaves them far too much at the mercy of advertising and has made them unduly sensi- tive to fluctuations in circulation.
But lamentable though it might be, the public's reluctance to fork out for their daily fodder really does exist. It was to be expected, therefore, that the last batch of price increases would produce the usual drop in sales. But, very interestingly, nothing of the sort seems to have occurred. Look at a few figures. The Guardian, which used to be 6d, and then went up to 8d, goes from strength to strength. The reaction among those who take more than one paper seems to have been to cancel one of the others rather than the Guardian itself. The figures show that over recent months sales have gone up from 290,000 to the present total of 305,000 a day. 'Once we've got 'em, we reckon they're hooked on us' the circulation man said, with just a trace of pride.
At first sight, the rest of the evidence seems to point in another direction, since most of the other papers have dropped circu- lation. (The exception is the Sun, up from 850,000 to around 1,600,00( in just five months.) The Mail is down 25,000 to its present figure of 1,930,000. The Mirror, at 4,750,000 is 100,000 down on last March's sales. The Telegraph has dropped 20,000 to today's figure of 1,390,000, and the Sketch is down to about 815,000 compared with 865,000 last October.
The interesting thing, however, is that these falls are not attributable to price rises. Because the fact is that, since the increases, they have all sold far more than they were doing before. The reason for this is very simple. The price rises were immediately followed by a couple of weeks packed with news: the Budget, the 'wife and children held by gunmag story, the Swiss avalanche, and, most of all, the Apollo 13 saga. There is no doubt that the boost these happenings have given to sales also gives a boost to the old, and sometimes forgotten, adage that what sells newspapers is news. 'We couldn't have chosen a better week to put the price up, old boy' said an enthusiastic voice from the Mirror building. 'They've been so eager to buy they haven't noticed the increase' said another delighted circulation executive. 'In any case, what's the difference between fivepence and sixpence these days?' a third asked, and supplied his own answer: `Nothing'.
Which brings us to the Sketch, the one popular which hasn't put its price up. Its reasons are obvious. Murdoch's Sun is pro- viding stiff opposition. Holding down the Sketch's price sounded like good sense, and it was backed up by a television and cinema advertising campaign stressing the -fate( that the unchanged price means sixpence less on the bill at the end of the week. But the Sketch wasn't to know that the increases would be followed by a week so full of news that almost any paper would sell at almost any price. The Sketch will doubtless have to go up in price soon. It looks very much as though it could have done so this week without any effect on circulation at all. Which is very bad luck, since it may now find itself having to put its price up at a time when there's nothing to cushion the shock.
But it's early days yet. Maybe in a week or two people will start moaning about those extra pennies on their paper bills. Maybe they'll show us that the British public still doesn't realise just what value its daily papers are. They'll eat, in a couple of minutes, a block of chocolate costing twice as much. They'll smoke the price away in a couple of cigarettes, before they've even finished the sports page. They'll drink a week's supply of the Telegraph in one quick gulp. And they'll go on not realising just how much better their paper could be if they were only pre- pared to pay just that bit more for it. I sup- pose one day they might learn. We can only hope so.
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