In my previous post, I wrote about the travails of the Australian book trade, as measured by the value of bookshop sales up to the end of February 2012. When I was at the London book fair recently, several people expressed shock at the size of the drop, and asked me whether there'd been any improvement. I had the unfortunate duty of telling them that things had got worse. Bookscan figures since that post have revealed that the value of book-trade sales dropped even further in March and April, to be down by over 25 per cent. (There are signs in the first three weeks of May that the decline has started to moderate, to below 20 per cent, presumably because the effects of the collapse of Borders and Angus & Robertson have started to wash through the comparable 2011 figures.)
Many other Australian industries are suffering severely, and it's occurred to me that it might be useful to widen the lens a little, and look at what's been happening to a related industry -- our metropolitan press. Circulation figures have recently been released for the period ending 31 March 2012, and they show a significant decline compared to a year ago.
There are provisos, of course -- The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have stopped reporting giveaways and unprofitable sales, and all papers are showing significant online readerships. Nevertheless, some of the drops are jaw-dropping: both of the above papers are down by around 13 per cent, and even News Ltd's tabloid papers keep losing readers. For the country as a whole, the circulation of metropolitan and regional dailies dropped by 5 per cent.
Even this, however, masks the extent of the problem. Most people know that newspapers have been enduring declining sales for some time, but I doubt that the severity of that decline is well known.
As it happens, I wrote a short book in 1976, called Politics and the Media. (It was Scribe's first book. In case you're wondering, it went through several editions and printings.) Included in the 1978 edition was a table of circulation figures for our metropolitan press as of 30 September 1977 -- 35 years ago. Fortuitously, this enables me to tell a before-and-after story.
Here is a selection of those figures, based on Monday-to-Saturday sales, and ranked by size:
The Sun (Melbourne): 622,562
The Herald (Melbourne): 435,644
The Daily Telegraph (Sydney): 316,417
The Courier-Mail (Brisbane): 271,880
The Sydney Morning Herald: 263,746
The West Australian (Perth): 248,417
The Advertiser (Adelaide): 236,813
The Age (Melbourne): 236,000
The figures for our two national dailies were:
The Australian: 118,087
The Australian Financial Review: 47,605
Now, a lot has happened in the intervening 35 years. In the newspaper industry, Rupert Murdoch was allowed to buy the Herald and Weekly Times Group, and therefore to end up with around 70 per cent of newspaper circulation. Afterwards, he merged Melbourne's morning paper, The Sun, with its afternoon paper, The Herald, to create The Herald Sun. This means that it's not possible to make direct sales comparisons of those entities; but, for the purposes of this post, and given that The Herald was declining rapidly (as were all afternoon papers), The Sun's figures might as well be compared to the Herald Sun's.
Sunday papers also disappeared and emerged in different states, so I have ignored them for the purposes of this discussion. As well, circulation figures are now broken down into weekly and Saturday-only figures.
In the wider economy, the economic liberalisation and de-regulation fervour of the 1980s meant that the financial sector became much more prominent. This, in turn, led to the emergence of a business press that flourished for some time; in the process, the Financial Review's sales increased steadily.
Given these caveats, here is the story today. As well as supplying the Monday-to-Friday figures, I have taken the extra step of producing the Monday-to-Saturday figures, as that is what was done 35 years ago, and it enables a direct comparison to be made. (For those who are interested, I checked first with the Audit Bureau, and was advised that the right way to do this is to multiply the MondayâFriday figure by five, add it to the Saturday figure, and divide the total by six.)
The Herald Sun (MâF): 469,377
The Herald Sun (S): 472,047
The Herald Sun (MâS): 469,822
The Daily Telegraph (MâF): 336,348
The Daily Telegraph (S): 327,447
The Daily Telegraph (MâS): 334,865
The Courier-Mail (MâF): 187,897
The Courier-Mail (S): 255,520
The Courier-Mail (MâS): 199,168
The Sydney Morning Herald (MâF): 180,960
The Sydney Morning Herald (S): 293,234
The Sydney Morning Herald (MâS): 199,672
The West Australian (MâF): 179,824
The West Australian (S): 314,568
The West Australian (MâS): 202,281
The Advertiser (MâF): 176,102
The Advertiser (S): 235,830
The Advertiser (MâS): 186,057
The Age (MâF): 165,061
The Age (S): 241,029
The Age (MâS): 177,722
The figures for our two national dailies were:
The Australian (MâF): 127,942
The Australian (S): 290,323
The Australian (MâS): 155,006
The Australian Financial Review (MâF): 70,518
The Australian Financial Review (S): 69,057
The Australian Financial Review (MâS): 70,275
Here is the difference for each of the above newspapers, expressed in percentage terms, over the 35 years:
The Herald Sun: -24.5 per cent
The Daily Telegraph: +5.8 per cent
The Courier-Mail: -26.7 per cent
The Sydney Morning Herald: -24.3 per cent
The West Australian: -18.6 per cent
The Advertiser: -21.4 per cent
The Age: -24.7 per cent
The Australian: +31.3 per cent
The Australian Financial Review: +48.6 per cent
As bad as these figures are for most newspapers, even they mask the size of the real problem. In 1977, Australia's population was around 14 million; in 2012, it is around 22 million -- an increase of 57 per cent. This means that, just to keep pace with population growth, newspaper circulations needed to increase by 57 per cent over those 35 years.
To put it another way, the apparent drop in The Age's circulation of 25 per cent was a real drop of 82 per cent. The apparent rise of 6 per cent for The Daily Telegraph was a real drop of 51 per cent. Even the apparent rise of 31 per cent for The Australian was a real drop of 26 per cent. (It's notable that these two Murdoch-owned newspapers have done so well, relatively.)
It could be argued that online readership has reduced the importance of these declines, and that's true as far as it goes. But online readership is a relatively recent development, it's only one-twelfth the size of print sales, and it garners nowhere near the revenue of print sales.
It could also be argued that the newspapers bear a considerable responsibility for their own problems -- especially because they've become so lightweight and cynical over the years in their coverage of events. But this is a chicken-and-egg argument: their managers and journalists would say that they've been responding to consumers, and their consumers would say that they've been responding to the product.
Whatever the reasons and qualifications, these figures add up to a catastrophic collapse in sales and revenues for most of the nation's metropolitan newspapers. This is not sustainable, so there'll clearly be major changes ahead. The Fairfax group, in particular, can't possibly keep going the way it is. For years, there's been scuttlebutt that they're planning to drop their print editions completely, and I suspect that this is true. But even this might not save them.
The deeper problem, of course, is what happens to civil society when major outlets for serious journalism wither or disappear. This is not a hole that Crikey or The Monthly can fill.
One final, eerie point: the drop in newspaper sales is very similar to (although not as bad as) the drop in the sales value of printed books over the same period. Thirty-five years ago, even a small publisher could expect to sell 3,000 hardback copies of any given book, and then around 5,000 paperback copies. Today, the average print-run is close to 2,000 copies (in paperback), and total sales of 5,000 would be considered a triumph.
The similarity does not end there. Sales of e-books are rising rapidly, to the point where they're probably over 15 per cent of revenues from p-books for most publishers. But the drop in value of p-book sales is much greater than the rise in value of e-book sales.
Both print-legacy industries -- newspapers and books -- are facing similar problems for similar reasons, simultaneously. Both hope that digital developments will save them. And both don't know if they're right.
Henry Rosenbloom