Did You Know That Newspapers Are a $180 billion Global Industry With More Advertising Revenues Than Radio, Outdoor, Cinema, Magazines And The Internet Combined? Maybe They’re Not Dead After All!

But at the risk of sounding like one of those doom and gloomers, one has to also report that the updated statistics to WAN’s respected World Press Trends annual publication shows that the splurge is coming mostly from the developing world – which is good news for them – but in North America and Europe the numbers are actually down a bit for the paid-fors, and it is the developed world on which the gloom and doom people tend to concentrate.

But not to take away from the thunder of WAN’s glee, the update tells us, “The total number of paid-for and free dailies altogether increased by more than 14% over the last five years, and by 3.31% year-on-year in 2005. The total number of paid-for dailies increased by more than 13% over the last five years, followed by a year-on-year growth of 2.76% in 2005. The total circulation of paid-for and free dailies altogether increased by 9.95% over five years, followed by year-on-year growth by 2.36% in 2005. The total circulation of paid-for dailies in the world increased by 6.39% over five years, followed by 0.74% year-on-year growth in 2005.”

This is all being led by India and China. In New Delhi, for instance, just this week two new dailies were introduced. A look at the figures for India tells the success side of the story. The number of paid-for dailies in the period 2001 – 2005 increased by 22.8% and in the period 2004 – 2005 alone the increase was 6.07% In those two same periods average circulation rose 33.08% and 7.01%.

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One May Not Think Of Africa When Looking For Thriving Newspaper Markets, But Then One Would Make A Big Mistake By Neglecting South Africa
The headlines about newspaper success coming out of South Africa recently are enough to make grown publishers in the US and Europe cry. The Sunday Sun, for instance, merely five years old, just announced its latest audited figures showing sales up by 10% over the same three month period last year, and its 195,850 circulation now leads Sundays by 17,000 over its next competitor.

The Danish Free Newspaper Civil War Has Started With Four New Free Daily Household-Delivered Newspapers Launched Within A Week In Preparation For The One They All Fear Coming in September
Denmark has become a messy, bloody, free newspaper battleground as four new free newspapers launch within a week in preparation for the arrival of the one they all fear next month that the Danish Post Office has agreed to deliver to households throughout the country before 7 am

Russian Freedom Of The Press Has Come A Long Way Since Soviet Times -- And the Country Needs To Be Given Credit For That -- But Its Political Leaders Still Haven’t Grown That Thick Skin They Need To Govern In A Truly Democratic Society
Until the very last minute the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) admitted some of its membership objected to its annual meeting that concluded last week from being held in Moscow. It was right to go there, and it took a very gutsy WAN to tell President Putin inside his own Kremlin Palace in front of the world that he and his government needed to do more to ensure true press freedom. As good an example of free speech as one could demonstrate.

The Kremlin Launches A Full Court Charm Offensive As 1,500 Of The World’s Leading Newspaper Executives and Editors Descend on Moscow To Hear Vladimir Putin and Top Aides Talk About Press Freedom in Russia As Part of the World Association of Newspapers Congress
It was only six years ago that Vladimir Putin, the newly elected president of Russia said, “Without a truly free media Russian democracy will not survive and we will not succeed in building a civil society.” Since then at least a dozen journalists have lost their lives and there is very little independent media left with major media outlets now basically under Kremlin control. Once again in Mother Russia, things are done a bit differently.

As The World Criticizes Google For Accepting Self-Censorship in China and Officials There Banning Yet Another Newspaper, It’s Worth Remembering That China Produces One In Every Seven Newspapers Hitting the Streets Globally
There were big damming headlines around the world that Google had sold-out to self-censorship in order to operate in China. On The Same Day Chinese authorities also closed Bing Dian, an influential weekly newspaper -- China banned 79 newspapers in 2005. And yet for all that, for five years running China still leads the world by far in the volume of newspapers coming off the presses, accounting for one in seven globally.

But take Europe as a whole for that same period and the number of paid-for dailies in the period 2001 – 2005 grew by 13.77% but in the final year, 2004 – 2005, it became negative growth of 1.13%. And on the circulation front it dropped 6.34% from 2001 –2005, and it dropped 0.66% in the final year, 2004 – 2005. Combine the paid-fors and the free newspapers and circulation is up 14.24% in the five years to 2005, and up 3.31% in the final year. So whatever growth there is comes from the free newspapers, not the paid-fors.

In North America in the 2001 –2005 period the number of paid titles dropped 3.05% and in the final year, 2004 – 2005 the drop was 0.41%. But circulation, from 2001 – 2005 went down 4.47% and in the final year it was down 2.51%

That new beast – the free newspaper -- has skewered the numbers. WAN says that free daily newspaper circulation more than doubled in the five years from 12 million copies in 2001 to 28 million in 2005, an increase of 137%. What it doesn’t tell us is how many of those readers are new and how many gave up their paid-fors to get a newspaper for free.

So while WAN concentrates on the world’s newspaper readership as a whole, the real story is that emerging markets are doing just great but there are problems in the more developed countries that are seeing declines for the paid-fors but resilience for free papers. And its own figures bear out the so-called “conventional wisdom” that those paid-for problems are very real in the developed world, and glossing over those issues within the world numbers as a whole does not make them go away.

It also points out why newspaper publishers in the developed world now tend to speak of total readership instead of just print circulation, based on the fact that although print may have lost readers publishers say they have more than been made up for via traffic on the various digital multi-platforms. That’s probably hard to track but it something that WAN needs to start doing to make the point that all is really quite well in Europe and North America after all.

But having said that, the global numbers are impressive. WAN says that for the first time in history there are now more than 10,000 daily newspaper titles, more than 450 million copies are sold daily, there are more than 1.4 billion paid newspaper readers, and the total free daily circulation has more than doubled in five years.

And harping on the global theme, Timothy Balding, WAN’s CEO says, “The figures show that there has been a quiet revolution in the number of daily launches. This burgeoning growth of daily titles worldwide has largely gone unnoticed by market makers and media pundits obsessed with the digital media revolution.” But that does raise the question that are not newspaper publishers themselves obsessed with the digital media revolution and are they not trying to do everything they can to be a major part of that revolution?

He continues, “These trends also indicate the widespread, but often overlooked innovation that is occurring in the newspaper industry. While much attention has been focused on digital development, the print product is also changing. Even in the most developed markets, there has been a proliferation of new genres of newspapers, targeting new audience segments and generating creative marketing and distribution scenarios. And the surge of new, free titles thrust into the paid-for market is the result of many publishers rethinking the cover-price revenue model in place for more than 400 years.”

What must not be forgotten is that at the end of the day publishers are going to count their success not in new titles or higher or lower circulation, but in margin. It is the accountants who will ultimately determine whether a paid-for publisher is doing the right thing in also printing a free newspaper as is increasingly becoming the case.

It is generally well accepted today that newspaper publishers probably made a terrible mistake by making their news available for free on the Internet. Is it really such a good idea to make it free in print, too?

That old saying still applies to print, especially after glancing through many free newspapers, “You get what you pay for”!