The decline continues

Most of these papers have gone up in price year-on-year which isn't going to last forever but does give them some breathing room, and is never factored in here.

Things not going too well at the Sun either

The Sun recorded a loss of £68m last year amid falling print sales and the enormous cost of phone-hacking claims against its parent company from figures including Sir Elton John and Heather Mills.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, which publishes the Sun and retains liability for the activities of the News of the World, spent an enormous £54m on legal fees and damages related to the illegal interception of voicemails.

The figures, which cover the 12 months to July 2019, were revealed in accounts filed this weekend. They show that more than a decade after the phone-hacking scandal began, the company is still spending an eighth of its revenue dealing with the fallout, as new cases involving the likes of Prince Harry continue to be filed at the high court.

The Sun remains the biggest-selling print newspaper in the UK but is on track to lose that title to the Daily Mail at some point this year, as its paid circulation heads below 1.1m copies a day. This month it appointed a new leadership team of Victoria Newton as editor and Keith Poole as her deputy, with a focus on driving traffic to its website in competition with MailOnline

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/23/the-sun-records-huge-loss-amid-falling-print-sales-phone-hacking-damages

Heading for under a million readers a day in a nation of 55 odd million when it is only a paltry 25p anyway says a lot.

Reach PLC (Daily Mirror, Star and Express newspapers) released their results today too.

- 47m monthly readers but only 1m of these are registered
- Targeting higher yield per advert online
- Reach said print advertising revenue fell by 20 per cent last year to £152.5m
- 83% of revenue still comes from print despite huge online audience. Once again, shows the difficulties of living off advertising online.
- More job cuts last year to keep the print ship afloat: “significant cost efficiencies” last year, including £12m in structural cost savings and “incremental acquisition synergies” of £16m, with a number of staffing cuts last year.
- A 4.5 per cent drop in circulation revenue was “part-mitigated” by cover price increases and “availability investment”, the company said.

Press Gazette article here. FT article here.

doublej wrote: »

Does The Irish Times have a death wish?

I don’t believe that the income from her digital subscriptions comes anywhere near meeting the outgoings,yet the physical print offering is rapidly challenging the concept of value for money. The paper on Monday, at an RSP of €2.30 had a mere 20 pages.
If the loyal readers of the paper, whether home delivered or bought in a shop ceased purchasing, the consequences for the IT would be ruinous.

It would not be unthinkable to see a shift from daily print editions to daily digital-only editions and a Saturday print and digital edition.

The reporting of digital subscriptions is also exceedingly problematic for newspapers in general in that for the purposes of reporting, a digital subscription has no time period. That makes it difficult to ascertain if it is a yearly, monthly or short-term subscription. There have also been reports of large businesses cancelling their subscriptions to print editions and being offered replacement digital subscriptions.

Regards...jmcc

JTMan wrote: »

The Irish Times had 24,389 digital subscriptions on average from July to December 2019 excluding free subscriptions and the basic package. This is up from 18,903 in the comparable period in the prior year. Including free subs and the standard edition there are about 80,000 digital Irish Times subscriptions. The real number of paying digital subscriptions is somewhere in between these numbers.

The problem is that there's no breakdown on the duration of the subscriptions. Each year's subscriptions would be a mix of short-term and annual subscriptions. Without knowing the split, it is difficult to know how effective the digital strategy has been. There is also the level of discounting (partially the cost of acquiring the subscription) which is rarely mentioned and the subscription tier. When it comes to looking at subscription stats, most people just see the total subscriptions figure.

The numbers are growing at a good rate. The costs attached to a digital edition are tiny versus the print edition.

Costs are lower on the distribution side of things but going digital shifts a publication from being a "Yesterday's news tomorrow" operation to one with a 24 hour news cycle.

But yeah still today, the print edition brings in a lot more revenue than the digital edition but things are gradually shifting.

One of the biggest mistakes the IT made with its first paywall was getting a bunch of muppets to work out the strategy. They had no clue of what was happening on the Web and basically gave away millions in revenue to RTE and the Independent because Google introduced Adsense PPC at the time that the IT went behind a paywall. That paywall was a complete failure. That easy money market is long gone and people often use Adblockers to block PPC advertising. With Ireland.com, it had a category killer domain name but the the same clue-free management hit it hard again and it had to sell/lease the domain name. At least it made a decent profit on that investment.

Yeah, the paper just has 20 pages and is a mear relic of its former self. The main audience for the paper these days is the elderly who continue to purchase but their audience is literally dying.

It is a sad state of affairs but the IT had a chance to evolve. The problem was that it began to believe its own press releases and the management seemed to think that they were immune from any economic effects. At the heart of it was something quite simple. Their thinking and actions were those of management rather than publishers. Publishers tend to be ruthless feckers or they don't survive.

Yeah, I heard of a large Irish company that cancelled all their print copies as part of their carbon reduction plan and replaced the editions with digital editions.

The Covid pandemic may also hit the bulks. With cafes and restaurants closed, there are not many places to dump them. And quarantines and social distancing will hit much of the old school journalism that involves talking to people face to face.

Regards...jmcc

The WSJ have an interesting article on the effects on Coronavirus on the newspaper industry here (paywall).

Interesting. One would think that if money can contain the virus, that newspapers could also contain the virus of touched by a other people but the risk is probably exceptionally low.

Almost on cue:
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0325/1126320-local-newspaper-job-losses/

Regards...jmcc