Readers Galore
The Holton Readership Survey 1954. (2 guineas.) THAT every second adult in Britain reads the News of the World is, I imagine, no surprise to anybody; but it may give a passing moment of dim wonder to learn that the readership of Vogue includes almost a hundred thousand working-class men, to say nothing of nearly half a million working-class women. And which morning paper, would you imagine, had the largest proportion of its readers in households with television sets? Mirror? Herald? Telegraph? The answer is the Manchester Guardian (33 per cent.); the Herald has the lowest proportion of any national daily, with 19 per cent. On the whole however it is the readers of the Sunday Times who seem to have come nearest to the Dream Home; they positively revel in cars, garages, telephones (less than half the readers of The Times have a telephone), refrigerators, washing machines and what not. Only in domestic pets do the Sunday Times people seem a bit low; but this field is pretty hopeless, for nobody comes within sight of the Wolver- hampton Express and Star, who have a 68 per cent. that looks unbeatable.
The two handsome volumes from which this information is pro- duced can, with the lightest of squeezes, be made to produce a further stream of aperitifs to whet the appetite of the amateur sociologist, but that of course is not their purpose. They are designed to help advertisers to decide where space should be bought, and this they do with ferocious efficiency. The reading population is first divided up by sex, social class, regions, and so forth, and here both Hultons and the Institute go about matters in much the same way, and achieve much the same results. The Institute, for instance, discerns an Upper Class comprising 3.4 per cent. of the population; Hultons a Well-to-Do group—in which the head of the household earns around £1,300 a year and upwards—comprising 4 per cent. The Institute puts the working class at 64.8 per cent. of the population and Hultons at 64 per cent. Both recognise below the working class a section of 'the Poor'—something under a tenth of the whole community. Thereafter the population is subdivided in many ways, into smokers, beer drinkers, and so forth. The Institute's series of profiles, from which it is possible to see at a glance how the readership of a particular paper is made up, is particularly ingenious.
The identity of the measurements made by the two surveys is not by any means always as close as their initial measurement of social class. In general the Institute credits papers of all kinds with higher circulations (e.g., 12.8 million or 34 per cent. of the population for the Mirror as against Hulton's figures of 10.6 million and 28.9 per cent.) and this difference becomes serious when we find a gap of over three millions in the figure for the Herald. Something has gone badly wrong here. But the final impression left by both Surveys is that they have been compiled by people who know their business.
Previous page
