Weekend editions and supplements

Posted by John Burke on June 6, 2006 at 4:43 PM

As newspapers struggle with declining circulations, Saturday and Sunday editions along with supplements have proven to boost sales. George Brock, Saturday Editor of the UK's Times, Jan Jensen, Editor-in-Chief of Ekstra Bladet in Denmark and Berna Gonzàlez-Harbour, Sub-director, of the Spanish daily El Pais told the crowd at the 13th World Editors Forum of their papers' experiences with these feature-driven publications.

Brock took the floor first, reporting that the Saturday Times has a readership of 2 million and the most readers under 45 of its London quality competitors. It's Sunday sister boasts 3.5 million readers and accounts for half of all quality papers sold on Sunday in Britain.

The importance weekend editions play, according to Brock, can be seen in the substantial increase in pages. Throughout the 80's, the Saturday Times had only 1 section of 28 pages. Today it's a 378-page, 7 section collossus accompanied by a 470-page, 12 section Sunday edition.

Over the years, what used to be strictly news in the Saturday edition evolved into news, business, sports, travel, gardening, books, personal finance, property, listings, health, style, and food and drink. The wide variety of topics in weekend editions suits the weekend market when readers have more time to spend with the paper and when free papers and the Internet are not competing as much.

Brock summed up the success of weekend edtions by citing three keys:

Well-tuned variety
Responsiveness to social change
Balancing online and offline

Jan Jensen from the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet wasn't shy to say that his paper was won of the most credible in Denmark. Founded itself as an extra paper in 1904 to cover the war between Russia and Japan, today Ekstra Bladet produces a host of supplements.

The onlslaught of free papers has caused Ekstra Bladet to rethink its content strategy focusing on news, humor, sensation, exposures and provocation. It also launched a sports paper which by its own count is the most comprehensive sports coverage in Denmark.

Jensen admitted that there is no competition from free papers on weekends, but nevertheless, despite heavy rivalries with other major Danish papers, Ekstra Bladet has succeeded in increasing its weekend circulation. One contributing factor to this success is Flash, a 24-page supplement aimed at young and female readers.

In the fall, Ekstra Bladet will join with other Danish papers to print a free paper that will be distributed to 1.5 million people from Monday to Friday. There are three ways to fight the onslaught of free papers, said Jensen; journalism, journalism, journalism.

Jensen said that the paper's website is produced apart from the printed paper and attracts an entirely different audience, but that both the print and online editions make a profit of between 10 and 15%.

But Jansen reminded the audience that "We don't publish newspapers to make money. We make money to publish newspapers."

As for the Southern European weekend market, Berna Gonzalez-Harbour first pointed out to the Moscow audience that El Pais has a 29% hold on the entire Spanish newspaper market, a statistic that jumps to 38% on Sundays. The Spanish daily's Sunday edition has enjoyed a 75,000 circulation spike over the past 5 years.

The Sunday edition has also helped attract female readers, 48% of which make up the Sunday readership, as well as younger readers, 250,000 more of which read the paper on the weekends.

El Pais has witnessed the most success with weekend editions and supplements because it diversifies itself in content and in format: