Shrinking sales

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY

I never thought to find delight in something called the Institute of Practitioners in Advertis- ing's Duplication Tables. But I have, and I owe it to Mr Cohn Seymour-Ure, whose book The Press, Politics and the Public I have just been reading. From it I learn that the Duplication Tables show such things as that 15 per cent of the women who read Practical Motorist also read True Romance. Who could have thought that? Not me: It never even occurred to me that any women at all ever read Practical Motorist. Another glittering nugget Mr Seymour-Ure unearthed which dazzles me still, is the fact that, of the men who are heads of households and possess a lawnmower, 1 per cent read the Christian Herald. I find that in- credible. What a wonderful world we live in!

It made me realise that there can be an awful lot tucked away in a table, so I determined to study carefully the latest newspaper circulation figures, issued last weekend by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. I tried to. But for reasons which will be immediately apparent, it wasn't easy.

The explanation wasn't hard to find. No, that's wrong i: it was hard to find. Because somehow the AS of c figures didn't loom as large in the papers as they normally do. But ,once tracked down, it was easy to see why.

The Times carried them in Friday's business supplement, plus a page one story headed 'FALL IN SALES OF POPULAR DAILIES.' At once the reason for their invisibility in the populars be- came clear. Newspaper proprietors, like any- body else, are not over-fond of crying 'stinking fish;' if sales are falling, it is politic to keep quiet about it. If they pick up later, you can always blazon to the world how popular your particular print is with the public.

The figures were very interesting. They showed that as compared with the last six months of 1967, total sales of the popular

national dailies in the same period of 1968 fell by nearly three-quarters of a million a day.

The Mirror, which I recently helped to select

as the Newspaper of the Year, is down by a third of a million. So much for Mirrorscope

and the seriousness commended by Mr Heath

in his Savoy speech early this month. And though the Mirror put its price up last year, it did it in January, two months before the other populars and has, therefore, had much longer to recover, which it doesn't seem to have done.

The Express is down by 161.000 and the Mail by 105,000. The Sketch is the only one not to have dropped circulation : it seems to have performed the amazingly clever feat of selling exactly as many-886,000---in the back half of '68 as it did in the back half of '67. Damn clever, these Chinese.

The Sun is down by 121,000, which brings its circulation frighteningly near to a million— in fact, only 9,000 more. Take that fact, couple it with the end of the guaranteed life Mr King once gave it, and it begins to look as though there is a distinct chance of another death fairly soon.

Now all this is a bit of a blow for those people who say that the populars are respond- ing to changes in society and their leadership, so that the spread of education has been matched by an increasing seriousness in news- papers. Because either the populars aren't keep- ing up with their readers, who are consequently getting bored with them and going off to the qualities, or the spread of education isn't as effective as newspapermen think, and the populars are becoming too serious for their readers, who are consequently getting bored with them, but not going off to the qualities.

For though the total circulation of the posh papers• has gone up it nowhere near matches the fall in the pops—a gain of 32,000 a day, compared with that three-quarters of a million loss.

In fact, only two qualities have put on any- thing—the Financial Times, 15,000 up on 1967, despite a price rise of 2d in July of that year; and The Times, with a staggering increase of 51,000 a day, undoubtedly due to a vast adver- tising campaign, a much more readable lay-out, no price increase, and a lot more for your money; but as Lord Thomson loses on every copy he sells, he must have mixed feelings when he looks at the figures.

Both the Guardian and the Telegraph fell in the last half of '68, the Guardian by an estim- ated 12,000 a day, the Telegraph by 22,000, although of course it remains far and away the biggest seller of the qualities, with nearly 1.4 million daily.

So it's a pretty poor position the papers find themselves in generally. No wonder most of them chose not to report the figures. Any reader spotting that his paper is losing circula- tion might start to wonder what's wrong with it, and that could soon mean another reader lost.

That may be why The Times only published the figures for the dailies and not for the Sun- days. This nasty suspicion has also crossed the mind of ' Mandrake in the Sunday Telegraph, it seems: 'Could it be that the Sunday figures are embarrassing to The Times's sister paper, the Sunday Times, which has dropped 61,000 copies? Blushingly I record that the Sunday Telegraph is the only one that has gone up.' Which is as nice a dig as anyone has got in at the old Thunderer for some time.

By the way, for the sake of completeness, the rest of the Sunday figures are as follows: Sunday Mirror down 334,000; People down 181,000; News of the World down 143,000; Sunday Express down 62,000; Observer down 55,000; and Sunday Telegraph up 43,000.