A good read in the Mail? Have we been struck by a meteor or something?
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Newspaper talk
- Thread starter Kentishgreen
- Start date
You may need to take a seat Kentish...Daily Mail circulation Sept 2023, just short of 0.75 million, for comparison, The Daily Mirror 0.25 million.
As of this month, the Mail's circulation is down 10% year-on-year, and the Mirror 15%. The Reach group is doing especially badly, which means that the Herald is likely still struggling. Perhaps the Mail will get a circulation bounce after covering Argyle for once!
I cannot believe the Herald, or indeed many other local papers, will continue in physical form for much longer. National papers will be a decade behind. There will be no newspapers in twenty years time, which is as it should be, the waste of resources producing and distributing so much paper every day is no longer necessary.
I wish I could go back in time and turn him green!
As was mentioned earlier, daily newspapers are not long for this planet. All newspapers circulations will decline over the coming years as more and more people turn to the Internet for yet more "biased news" depending on who is writing said articles. I am old enough to remember the Daily Mirror as a great newspaper with reporters like John Pilger reporting from the Vietnam War. Unfortunately now the Mirror tends to concentrate on what Carol Vorderman is or isn't wearing. The Daily Mail does tend to concentrate on more serious topics but obviously slanted in a certain way. I suppose as it stands you pay your money you make your choice. All the same a good article about our club is surely something that we can all agree on as being a positive wether it's in the Mail, Mirror or The Beano. Coygs!!.
What is weird is how the dwindling number of newspapers in circulation (I agree they’ll disappear completely soon) still carry so much influence, being quoted daily on TV and radio.
Newspapers still carry an influence within the media bubble be it polical programmes on the TV or radio as they are all in the same London centric media bubble. Most people in Bolton, Hartlepool, Norwich or Plymouth take much notice or even care much for the 24 hour a day merry go round of political news. But an awful lot of saleries within the London bubble are dependent on talking to no one but each other in their bubble. Fine I say, let them gaze at their own navels, I, ll just concentrate on living and paying for my life as best as I can.
Print circulation is falling sharply in affluent countries, but actually rising in poorer ones, which means that, globally, more newspapers are being printed today than in any time in history. Some local newspapers are going digital only, but the nationals still make money from them. Lots of digital hits and subscriptions to match the print cover price.
Media rarely die out altogether, cf. hard copy books, radio, broadcast TV, cinema, vinyl etc. Print newspapers will, I predict, be boutique products. The days of rivers of gold are long gone, but still a nice little earner if you own a press.
Please see my reply to Green Flash - the death of the newspaper has been exaggerated, especially if you look beyond the Anglosphere. In countries like the UK, print circulation will continue to diminish, but newspapers will survive for some time.
It's known as agenda-setting. Newspaper talk gets picked up, circulated and amplified by radio, TV and social media, which then feed back into newspapers in a self-sustaining loop.
As per my reply to mervyn, what happens in London media ripples out to lots of other places and lives. Hard to avoid unless you put your head in a bubble!
I reckon there will be a place for printed weekly news "magazines" (which will be, and in fact already are, pretty expensive) but I do not think daily distribution will be worthwhile for very small circulations. Mass printing has so far escaped attention from a climate change point of view but sooner or later it will become a focus. There is a significant environmental cost to distributing so much paper. Offices have become largely paperless over the last decade or two, paper is on its way out - it is an outdated means of communication like stone tablets before it...
I retired from the printing industry in 2008, having just moved the company from litho to digital. What surprised me was that three years later UK paper consumption was still growing, and fifteen years later consumption is only down 10%, so it’s a very gradual decline.
Sadly, Green Flash, the paperless office is more myth than reality, and as with global newspaper circulation the production of paper is still very high. Then there is the problem that the digital technologies meant to reduce the environmental impact of making and moving paper demand staggering amounts of energy, which in turn threatens the trees that they were meant to protect. Not to mention the damage of rare earth mining and all the poisonous waste from rapidly obsolescent digital devices. That said, I agree that we should cut paper production and use big time, although managing paper's digital replacements is a difficult and dirty business.