Is there now less need to suck up to newspaper bosses?

Is there now less need to suck up to newspaper bosses?


Newspaper circulation figures December 2010 January 2000 Change +/-
Daily Mirror 1,133,440 2,270,543 -50.08%
Daily Star 713,602 502,647 41.97%
The Sun 2,717,013 3,557,336 -23.62%
Daily Express 623,689 979,042 -36.30%
Daily Mail 2,030,968 2,353,915 -13.72%
The Daily Telegraph 631,280 1,022,263 -38.25%
Financial Times 390,121 435,478 -10.42%
The Guardian 264,819 401,560 -34.05%
The Independent 175,002 222,106 -21.21%
The Times 448,463 726,349 -38.26%
***Total*** 9,128,397 12,471,239
26.80%

What are declining circulations doing to their political influence?

On Andrew Neil’s “This Week” last Thursday the former BBC boss, Greg Dyke, made a point that had not struck me before – that the ongoing decline in newspapers circulations is having a big influence on their political power.

Quite simply a Sun that sells 2.7m copies a day is less important than one that, at its heyday, sold more than 4m copies.

He was making the point in the context of News International – but it applies, surely, across the whole range of national daily papers with only the Star seeing an increase since that millennium. Overall the losses have been 26% though some papers have taken bigger hits than that. The Mirror has lost half its circulation in that time period.

I think that Dyke is right up to a point – but his old firm, the BBC, continues to take far too much notice of what the papers are saying which is allowing the press to continue to play a big role setting the agenda.

Mike Smithson

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