ABCs: Big news stories help newspapers slow their decline
Dramatic news events including the Queensland floods, the Christchuch earthquake and the Japanese tsunami helped Australia’s newspapers slow their circulation slides in the first three months of the year.
Only one title – the Saturday edition of Fairfax Media’s Australian Financial Review – suffered a double digit percentage drop in the latest set of figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It was down by nearly 15,000 to 78,312 sales in the first three months of the year.
In Monday to Friday sales, Brisbane’s Courier Mail saw the biggest falls, down just over 6%.
Among the Sunday papers, News Ltd’s WA paper The Sunday Times saw the biggest drop, down nearly 8%.
Although the drops in newspaper sales were last dramatic than in recent months, few saw gains. The best performer, The Sunday Age, was only up 1%
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large. He returned to Mumbrella as Publisher in January 2025
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There are lies, damn lies and statistics. The Melbourne Herald -Sun shows a 4.91% drop in circulation, so they publish an article today saying how their readership has jumped by 24,000 a day (according to Roy Morgan). All smoke and mirrors to me.
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Gee … that text is a bit small, Tim. I know you had to fit it to your page layout, but you could at least have the clickthroughs go to a larger version of the graph.
Meantime, seems a bit odd that a paper at the centre of one of those huge stories (Qld floods – Courier Mail) should suffer the worst drop in circulation. Maybe people turned to online/radio/TV instead?
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Yes, surely the big news here is the Herald Sun drop, which brings it below the magic 500,000 mark for the first time since – when? The Akerman editorship?
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