Government Affairs Blog

Newspaper readership is going up

Conventional wisdom says newspaper readership is in decline.  How then can the title of this piece seriously suggest the opposite?  It was John Kenneth Galbraith - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith - who argued we should always be wary of accepted fact, so if the author is wrong at least he is in good company.

Every day I travel to work on public transport with a “Guardian” in my hand.  The vast majority of my fellow commuters are holding “The Metro”.  It is a free newspaper that is distributed at every station in London.  Prior to this free sheet’s availability commuters read books, counted the stops they had before their journey ended or read a bought for broadsheet or tabloid.  This is anecdotal and based on a hunch but in the past more people were reading books than taking in the latest news.  Now on the return journey almost everyone is reading one of the free evening papers.

So for at least for a small proportion of London commuters the title of this piece is true.

According to a recent article in “PR Week”, – www.prweek.com/uk - (subscription access only) “Media Monitoring: Too much to monitor” by Joe Lepper, in 1993 there were 1,847 newspapers.  By 2006 this had grown to 3,445.  Newspapers exist to be read.  This increase indicates that more people must be reading more newspapers.

In another article in the weekly newspaper for public relation professionals, Gavin Houlgate of KPMG discusses a recent survey his firm conducted.  He reports that 72 per cent of people interviewed get their primary source of news from television and newspapers.

The final reason why more people are reading newspapers is the very reason for the decline of the circulation figures.  Newspapers can now be read online by anyone, anywhere.  While “The Guardian” – www.guardian.co.uk – slugs it out with “The Daily Telegraph” – www.telegraph.co.uk – over claims regarding which site has the most visitors, the fact is more and more people are accessing these sites and reading the content. 

All this would seem to indicate that newspaper readership is going up even if people are not reading a newspaper in its traditional form.   

Simon Goldie is Head of Communication at The Chartered Institute of Taxation – www.tax.org.uk - and a member of the CIPR GAG committee