Tabloids v Broadsheets: the British Press Battle Continues

The broadsheets - still lagging behind in terms of sales

There must be a synapse-or-several inside the mind of anybody who has been attacked in the British press that flickers into life and leaps with delight in the first week of every month. I say this only because the audited sale of the UK tabloid newspapers - by which I mean the combined circulation of the popular tabloids such as the Sun and mid-market papers such as the Daily Mail - has now been declining for a protracted period, according to the official Audited Bureau of Circulation (ABC) numbers. And each month, sometime in the first week or so, the ABC figures are published and discussed in the media: there for all to see.

Here is not the place for a detailed analysis. Safe to say that if you add the sale of the Daily Mail (which is not declining itself) the Daily Express, the Sun, the Mirror and the Daily Star the overall figure hasnÍt gone up for a very long time indeed.

Until last year I used to edit the biggest of these - the Sun - so I have lived and fought this battle from the other side and occasionally dreaded the upcoming ABCs and what my boss, Rupert Murdoch, might conclude from them. In my experience the pressure from him was as high when they were up as when they were down - because when they were up he wanted them to be up again next month. Nothing breeds the appetite for success like success.

But despite the temporary and occasional upward swings the downward decline has been undeniable for some time.

For those reading this outside the UK it should be explained that Britain is a unique newspaper market - there are 11 daily papers and nearly as many on a Sunday. Politicians and business leaders in this country constantly grill me on what the tabloid sales trends mean. Some, ever hopeful, think the sales decline means they should push fewer resources into those parts of their communications strategy aimed at this end of the market.

It is far too early to do that. The market share of the Sun, for example, remains more than 25 per cent in the UK market, which means that one in four of all papers bought here - including the broadsheets - are copies of the Sun. If you add up the market share of all the tabloids it comes close to 75 per cent. Such incredible success has been hard fought and will not be given up easily. If you look at the business leaders involved you can be guaranteed that they will fight for every copy.

Murdoch controls both the market leaders in the daily market and the Sunday market - the Sun and the News of the World. He also owns the Times and the Sunday Times. Associated Newspapers, controlled by Lord Rothermere, owns the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Standard in London and the fast growing free paper, Metro.The other player in the market is Richard Desmond, whose Express Newspapers owns the Daily Express, the Daily Star and the Sunday Express.

Murdoch is the most powerful newspaper magnate anywhere in the world since William Randolph Hearst, Rothermere has inherited a British powerhouse and Desmond is not to be dismissed. His business is cash generative and he is an ambitious man. All these factors, plus the great talent and vibrancy within these newspapers, combine to make it unlikely that this trend will lead to a crash anytime soon - no matter what their detractors may hope for.

At the other end of the UK market the recent decision by Robert Thomson, the editor of the Times, to turn the paper into a tabloid (or ïcompactÍ, as it is termed) will lead to an increase in sales. This has already happened for his rival editor at the compact Independent, Simon Kelner.

Having said that, anybody who thinks this repositioning is going to lead to a significant narrowing of the sales gap between the ïheaviesÍ and the ïtabloidsÍ is in for a shock. The current sale of the Times is 620,870 and that of the Independent is 228,174. Contrast that with still healthy Sun sales of 3,336,322 and the Daily MailÍs 2,346,229 - or even the MirrorÍs 1,793,718 - and you can see that the realities of the UK market are that the more serious papers lag behind.

This contrasts markedly with the United States, where the biggest selling dailies nationally are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The issue here is twofold, though, because those who want tabloid material tend to go to TV and those two papers are among the few who print nationally. Most other papers, including tabloids such as the New York Post - where I was deputy editor in the 1990s - and the New York Daily News are single-city papers.

Newspaper sales are falling all over the world in nearly every market. There are some good performers but generally, just as with network TV, customers lead such busy lives these days that either they are buying fewer newspapers or no newspapers at all. Despite all that, the message to anybody hoping for an early decline in the British red tops is very simple: the decline will not reduce their power for many, many years.

By David Yelland, senior vice chairman, Weber Shandwick, UK & Ireland.

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