Is there now less need to suck up to newspaper bosses?
| Newspaper circulation figures | December 2010 | January 2000 | Change +/- |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily Mirror | 1,133,440 | 2,270,543 | -50.08% |
| Daily Star | 713,602 | 502,647 | 41.97% |
| The Sun | 2,717,013 | 3,557,336 | -23.62% |
| Daily Express | 623,689 | 979,042 | -36.30% |
| Daily Mail | 2,030,968 | 2,353,915 | -13.72% |
| The Daily Telegraph | 631,280 | 1,022,263 | -38.25% |
| Financial Times | 390,121 | 435,478 | -10.42% |
| The Guardian | 264,819 | 401,560 | -34.05% |
| The Independent | 175,002 | 222,106 | -21.21% |
| The Times | 448,463 | 726,349 | -38.26% |
| ***Total*** | 9,128,397 | 12,471,239 |
–26.80%
|
What are declining circulations doing to their political influence?
On Andrew Neil’s “This Week” last Thursday the former BBC boss, Greg Dyke, made a point that had not struck me before – that the ongoing decline in newspapers circulations is having a big influence on their political power.
Quite simply a Sun that sells 2.7m copies a day is less important than one that, at its heyday, sold more than 4m copies.
He was making the point in the context of News International – but it applies, surely, across the whole range of national daily papers with only the Star seeing an increase since that millennium. Overall the losses have been 26% though some papers have taken bigger hits than that. The Mirror has lost half its circulation in that time period.
I think that Dyke is right up to a point – but his old firm, the BBC, continues to take far too much notice of what the papers are saying which is allowing the press to continue to play a big role setting the agenda.