Media Matters
Stephen Glover
One of my duties as a press columnist is to look at the sales of newspapers published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. This is usually a melancholy task. Month by month the sales of most titles go down. But some fare much better than others. One of the best performers has been the Times, and one of the worst the Guardian. The latest figures show that the average daily sales of the former stand at around 442,000, while those of the latter have dipped below 160,000.
This snapshot may not seem strange to some. In a historical context it is utterly amazing. For until quite recently the two newspapers sold approximately the same number of copies. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s they were roughly level-pegging, with the Guardian sometimes a nose ahead. In 1993 the Times slashed its cover price, which gave its sales a boost. But actually the Guardian held up quite well under this competitive pressure – much better than the Independent. If we go back ten years, we find the Times selling about 685,000 copies a day and the Guardian just under 400,000. Since then the Times has admittedly lost a good deal of circulation, largely because it has ended its ‘price war’ and reverted to a more realistic cover price. Meanwhile, the sales of the Guardian have collapsed. At this rate they will sink below 100,000 within a few years.
Why should this be? The Guardianreading public has not suddenly shrunk. Nor has the paper become unreadable. The continuing attractiveness of its editorial offering may be judged by the title’s huge online success. It is the fourth or fifth most popular newspaper website in the English-speaking world. Millions of people look at the Guardian online. But there is the nub of the problem – for why would you pay £2 a day Monday to Friday for the print edition when you can read much of the same stuff (and some extra articles) free online? Some readers continue to buy the newspaper, of course, particularly oldies, but many have defected to the web.
This would not matter if the web were wonderfully profitable, but it isn’t. More than a decade ago, the then editor-inchief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, set the paper on a ‘digital first’ path in the expectation that the internet would one day be a lucrative source of income for newspapers. It hasn’t turned out that way. Facebook and Google, which offer advertisers vastly bigger audiences than any online newspaper, may make huge sums of money on the internet, but the Guardian is struggling to increase its modest online income. In fact, the revenues it derives from its shrunken print operation still exceed those it gets from its huge online audience.
While the Guardian rashly put all its hopes in the internet, its then rival the Times went in the opposite direction, and decided to charge readers for online access. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was accused in fashionable circles of being a Luddite. Clever people said he was too old to understand the internet. In the event, out of judgement and no doubt some luck, the strategy has worked triumphantly. Over the past five years the Times has lost very few sales (and also built up a paying digital audience of nearly 100,000), while the circulation of the Guardian has virtually halved. Helped by cost-cutting, the Times is roughly breaking even for the first time in living memory, whereas the Guardian has posted eye-popping losses of £69 million for last financial year. To put it bluntly: the businessman Murdoch called it right, whereas the Guardian, which has been run by people with little financial acumen, got it disastrously wrong.
The question is what the paper’s comparatively new editor and chief executive, Katherine Viner and David Pemsel respectively, can do to get themselves out of the pit into which their predecessors have dropped them. I fear the answer is: very little. It’s probably too late for them to start charging readers for online access to the Guardian’s website. If they belatedly did so, the audience might immediately contract by ninety per cent, and the paper would make even less money out of the internet than it does at the moment. People are most unlikely to start buying the print edition in greater numbers. It can’t be revived. The old print readers have gone, and won’t come back.
All Viner and Pemsel can do is cut costs (which they are doing) and hope that internet advertising eventually comes good, which it probably won’t. The Guardian will survive, of course, as a scaled-down online newspaper. It has a (diminishing) fighting fund of some £700 million thanks to wise investment decisions made a quarter of century ago. But the possibilities which were open to it ten years ago – and which were seized by the Times – have been closed off. One paper took the right turn. The other did not.