When Les Hinton Gets It Wrong – Sales of The Sun Dropped in June Instead of Getting A World Cup Bump – Then You Know That Newspaper Reading Habits Have Forever Changed And Newspapers Had Better Change Their Ways

Philip M. Stone July 17, 2006

Les Hinton, executive chairman of News International, UK, told a standing-room only audience of global newspaper publishers in early June that with the World Cup starting soon that he expected to see up to a 12% bump in daily sales of the Sun tabloid, Britain’s largest circulation daily newspaper. What he ended up getting was selling 82,000 fewer copies in June than he did in June a year ago – a drop of 2.54% with average June sales of 3,148,700, down 329 from May.

Hinton told the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) annual Congress June 5 held in Moscow that in the 2002 World Cup sales went up 6% and “This year we’ll be in the finals so we’re looking to double those extra sales this time around.”

Well, of course England didn’t even make it to the semifinals, but there were enough victories and good stories going around until they were knocked out that there was plenty of opportunity for a big bump. But it didn’t happen. On the day after an England victory there was a slight increase in sales, but nothing to write home about.

As for the rest of the News International UK stable, at the compact Times, sales dropped 1.01% from May and were down 3.9% year-on-year. The News of the World, Britain’s largest circulation newspaper at an average of 3,471,415 copies sold each Sunday, saw circulation down 1.26% compared with May and down 92,000 copies – 2.57% -- year-on-year. Only The Sunday Times was steady, seeing almost a 1% rise over May, and falling by less than 1% year-on-year, but its credit for June goes not to the World Cup but rather to a popular DVD giveaway.

The doom was just about the same with other titles although there were a few exceptions. The Observer  saw a 6.7% increase in June, year-on-year – an increase of 30,000 copies. The newspaper switched to the Berliner size in January and has had a good circulation climb ever since, beating May by 2.13%.

The Daily Mirror which has had a horrible year, managed to do better in June increasing sales by 2,000 over May but it was still down 107,000 copies, year on-year – an overall 6.11% drop.

Most other titles saw little change, although in London the tabloid Evening Standard was down 10% over May. One would have thought a PM had plenty of time to extol the virtues of an England team and print plenty of great color pictures that would attract the masses, but it just wasn’t to be.

The World Cup performance should be sending a shudder through what used to be called Fleet Street. It is set events likes these – major sporting championships – that the masses have flocked to their favorite rag, willing to spend money to read about their favorites. But suddenly no bump for such a sporting giant event? Why? The answer has to fall to the obvious – that readers are getting what they want elsewhere and that means television, free newspapers and the Internet.

Television ratings were the highest ever – so people certainly were interested in the World Cup and watched in the largest numbers so far. But they didn’t see any reason to change their preferred reading habits.

It was, after all, there on the web instantaneously. Remember that FIFA had backed down on its earlier rules and allowed web sites to run pictures from the games as soon as they became available rather than waiting two hours until after the final whistle – what a disaster those original rules would have been considering all the games that went to penalty shootouts.

And the news agencies had all their voluminous copy on the Internet as fast as possible, covering just about every angle of every team, so the only reason to change habits and buy a newspaper the next day would be if it had some local angle exclusive or there was a columnist one really enjoyed. Otherwise, why spend the money when it was all there for free on the web?

The sad fact is, the newspapers didn’t provide anything that readers felt they couldn’t obtain elsewhere at no cost. And if that isn’t worth a shudder then what is?

But take a look at what happened across the Channel in France, the one country where newspaper readership has been in the pits for years – add the circulation of all the French nationals together and they wouldn’t equal the circulation of The Sun. The day after France beat Brazil, the street sales of the daily L’Equipe sports newspaper almost trebled to 900,000. Now the French are avid Internet users, and they have plenty of free newspapers, but in droves on that one day they spent some Euros for a newspaper they did not normally buy. Obviously a “feel-good” factor. Now while none of England’s victories were as meritorious as what France did to Brazil, what were the British newspapers doing wrong that L’Equipe did right?

Here’s a clue – there is plenty of evidence out there that people want good news and yet the UK newspapers are usually full of blame on why things go wrong with England results. Even in victory players and managers get slammed. 

Maybe, just maybe, if the newspapers concentrated on the positive rather than the negative they would have gotten that bump – assuming, of course, there was something positive about England’s performance!

ftm Follow Up & Comments