Results matching “evening news for free”

The latest circulation figures for UK newspapers (June 30 to July 27) indicate that the papers with the largest circulation were the popular national weekly The Sun and Sunday title News of the World. The lowest circulation figures for that time period, meanwhile, were seen at the weekly up-market nationals The Scotsman and the Sunday Herald.

Here are the figures for the weeklies from www.publicitas.com:

Popular national newspapers:
The Sun: 2,896,330
Daily Mirror: 1,318,168
Daily Star: 605,261

Middle market national newspapers:
The Daily Mail: 2,077,545
Daily Express: 687,069

Up-market national newspapers:
The Daily Telegraph: 799,021
The Times: 547,381
The Guardian: 292,909
The Independent: 178,576
Financial Times: 130,695 (worldwide circulation: 423,575)
The Herald: 61,317
The Scotsman: 49,417

Evening London newspapers:
Evening Standard: 292,455

Free daily newspapers:
Metro (all editions): 1,359,261
The London Paper: 500,068
London Life: 401,543
City AM: 88,042

The figures for the Sunday publications are:

Popular national newspapers:
News of the World: 2,918,661
Sunday Mirror: 1,212,838
The People: 577,718
Daily Star Sunday: 308,606

Middle market national newspapers:
The Mail on Sunday: 1,956,981
Sunday Express: 604,282
Sunday Post: 380,728

Up-market national newspapers:
The Sunday Times: 985,848
The Sunday Telegraph: 580,909
The Observer: 375,776
Independent on Sunday: 151,301
Scotland on Sunday: 60,024
Sunday Herald: 43,374

Source: Publicitas

Back in 2001, the Guardian newspaper asked, "Where have all the women gone?", and it is a question that has plagued the editors of leading British newspapers for the past two decades as only 41% of women - 10.3 million - read a daily UK newspaper (October to March 2008).
 
Genevieve Roberts, a former features writer and reporter for The Independent, now an advertising planner for McCann Erickson on the Evening Standard account, told me: "Almost every newspaper is trying to appeal to female readers. In crude commercial terms, females are the main shoppers in more than 50% of households, and advertisers want to appeal to people who shop so they have the opportunity to buy their product."

This is the crux of the issue, advertising is now more than ever driving the bottom-line of newspapers, and it is crucial that newspapers attract the right demographic to appeal to advertising agencies and businesses.

Without female readers, the advertisers will look elsewhere.

The Glossy Magazine Approach

Newspapers are tackling this problem in two distinctly different ways: the glossy/gossip magazine approach and the female interest approach.

Daily Mirror
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 43%)

Daily Mirror Editor Richard Wallace has discretely changed the focus of the newspaper from the traditional male-orientated tabloid to appeal to women who buy popular weekly gossip magazines.

Andrew Higton, a sub-editor at The Mirror, told me that this marketing approach has involved a significant change in culture for the staff. Editors, reporters and sub-editors are often told to make copy more "female-friendly". This new approach is applied at all levels, for example, when President Nicolas Sarkozy of France visited the UK, subs were told to focus much of the story on Carla Brunei's outfits.

The Daily Mirror's shift towards the glossy magazine style has also involved changing the look of the whole newspaper in an attempt to make it more visually appealing to the female market. The newspaper has now gone full-colour, redesigned its features pages, covers female issues such as family life and children, and it contains more celebrity-focused pictures alongside the news stories.

Daily Express

This is also the approach that Richard Desmond's Daily Express is following. The newspaper is using its experience in the magazine market (Richard Desmond is the proprietor of the increasingly popular weekly glossy magazine, "OK!") to attract women readers. It is also the path that several of the new free daily newspapers are following, such as The London Paper, which regularly features celebrity stories on its front page.

The Female Interest Approach

Daily Mail

However, Helen Lewis, sub-editor at the Daily Mail, said to me that she is not so sure that the glossy magazine route is correct. She told me, "The problem lies in conflating 'female interest' with 'celebrity story', and although it's been a successful formula, I think it's one that's coming to the end of its usefulness in terms of shifting copies."

The Daily Mail is the most successful newspaper in the UK in terms of attracting female readers. In 1995 (Jan to Dec) 49% of its readers were female, in 2006 (Jan to Dec) this had grown to 52% and the figures for 2007 show that it had held onto this 52% demographic. The Daily Mail enjoys more female than male readers. However, it has not completely gone down the celebrity gossip/magazine style. Undoubtedly it does feature these kinds of stories, but it balances this with news stories and a style proven to attract female readers. According to the National Readership Survey, women care about news - it being their "main reason for purchase" - but they like to be told pretty briskly what has happened, but not what it all may or may not mean. The survey also indicates that British women are turned off by sport and are not too keen on finance.

A quick glance at the Daily Mail after reading this data shows how the Daily Mail has struck the right balance to appeal to the female demographic.

Genevieve Roberts told me during an interview on this issue: "In the UK, the Daily Mail has the highest percentage of female readers, and unsurprisingly, this increases its appeal for advertisers."

The Times
(From July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 42%)

The Times deliberately targets females with its T2 supplement magazine, just as the Guardian (from July 2007 to December 2007: Female = 46%) targets females with its supplement magazine, G2.

These magazins are not aimed solely at women, but The Times' chose to advertise to females when it re-launched the supplement, indicating the importance of female readers to this publication. In a £1m-plus campaign, they targeted a cross-section of women: professionals, housewives and mothers.

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal Online appears to agree with The Times and the Daily Mail's approach for attracting female readers. In May of this year it launched a new section aimed at a female audience, however, it is also not going down the glossy magazine route. WSJ Online executive editor Alan Murray told Reuters, "Our experience has shown us that there are a lot of business and professional women out there who crave not just fashion and beauty advice, but an intelligent news-oriented community where they can share experiences and swap ideas."

Early indicators point to the Female Interest Approach as having the most success, but only time will tell which strategy works in the long run. The battle lines have been drawn in one of the world's most aggressive newspaper markets, and it is certainly a battle that other editors will watch with interest.

Sources: Newspaper Marketing Agency, Brand Republic, Reuters

Though there are economic strains on the journalism industry, Paul Myners, chairman of Guardian Media Group, remarked that journalists are not driven out of the industry, but instead are working on other mediums, such as blogs, radio, and local television, which reinforces a previous statement by Mediashift.

"The type of people doing work which might broadly be described as journalistic, may not have necessarily decreased to the extent of the proportion who are working in the newspaper industry," said Myner.  "Someone who was previously described as a journalist who sat at a typewriter, now podcasts, now speaks to video, now blogs online. It is a more challenging and appealing job.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said otherwise: "The plight of staff in the newspaper industry should not be overshadowed by increased new media opportunities for journalists."

He argued that staff "are spread ever more thinly across more media" and that there are "a lack of resources and understaffing." with a smaller number of journalists trying to deliver more content in more platforms.

Concurrently, the U.S. has suffered the biggest staff drop this year. Our colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors has captured the hard times through images here and here.

However, Myners noted that in the last 12 months, the Guardian Media Group appointed 60 new journalists to its national titles in order to further their digital content, since their readership is moving online. According to Myners, more people read the Guardian's US website than read the print versions in the UK, Guardian.co.uk  was the most popular UK newspaper website in February with 19,519,923 unique users, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

"We have gone from being a provincial newspaper... to an international, liberal voice on the web," he said.

He added that "the proportion of journalists at the Observer and Guardian covering international news has increased."

But Myners cautioned that the declining economy will lead to more regional newspaper mergers and more free sheets, which does not rule out the Manchester Evening News from being completely free in the city center yet being sold on the outskirts.

"It is an economic model which accurately reflects the cost of distribution," Myners said.

However, the freesheet model does not seem to be doing significantly better than traditional newspapers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk ,Press Gazette

The Evening Times in Glasgow has launched 12 more community websites in response to the success of their initial 12.

Other improvements are being planned such as the expansion of the popular noticeboard section, where users can publicize events for free, and the categorization of picture sections, where amateur photographers can upload their images.

Assistant editor Graeme Smith said: "Traffic has exceeded all our expectations and we've brought forward our roll-out of the next batch in response. We're still compiling figures from the first fortnight but obviously we would not have accelerated the introduction of the second phase if we hadn't been greatly encouraged by the interest we've had so far."

The Evening Times hopes to create up to 80 community sites by the end of the year. The 12 new sites cover Anniesland, Baillieston, Bridgeton, Calton, Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Govan, Knightswood, Merchant City, Parkhead, Pollok and Yoker.

Source: Hold the Front Page

Has Manchester Evening News (MEN), which has adopted a hybrid part-paid for, part free method of distributing their papers, inspired other papers to follow suit?

"Inevitably it will spread to some other publications but I would add the rider that it won't work for everyone," MEN Editor Paul Horrocks said. "We have a big city center base to work on."

Horrocks predicts that national newspapers will soon adopt this practice as well, especially if they have poor availability and poor sales in certain areas, though he concedes they would be "taking a big risk."

The Liverpool Daily Post has had a 16% increase in ad revenue a year after it introduced a part hybrid model.

"We will see more titles introduce an element of part free," said Georgina Harvey, managing director of Trinity Mirror regionals.

Source: Guardian News

In 2006, when the Manchester Evening News (MEN) decided to split its circulation into partly free and partly paid-for, few analysts would have bet on the strategy's success. But according to Follow the Media's Philip Stone, MEN's strategy has succeeded in increasing its total circulation by 34%, up to 180,000 copies, nearly 100,000 of which are free.

On the other hand, the Evening News is giving away more copies than it is selling, whereas it had expected a third of copies to be given away and two thirds to be paid for.

So although MEN increased its circulation, its print circulation revenues are lower than expected. In the past year, MEN's paid circulation fell 13.5%, and was down 6.4% in the past six months - the worst paid-for sales performance of any UK regional paper.

Granted, thanks to the increased circulation, MEN increased its national ad revenue by 8% in the first year after the move.

"The question, of course, is how many of those 81,000 remaining paid-fors can he hold onto," concluded Stone.

Or whether MEN will compensate for declining paid-for circulation through online revenues, thanks to the 73,300 daily unique users it now attracts to its website.

Read here about how MEN integrated and converged its media outlets and newspapers around its flagship title.

Source: Follow the Media

The Audit Bureau of Circulation has changed its regulations, enabling regional newspapers such as the Manchester Evening News to count free copies in their circulation figures, starting in August this year.

In 2006, when the Manchester Evening News decided to make the paper free in central Manchester, while keeping paid-for distribution in the city’s outskirts, few fellow publishers understood such a decision. Yet at the heart of this commercial move lays a greater will to adapt to the decline of print ad revenues by becoming a converged media group, and the Evening News now boasts the UK’s most integrated regional newsroom.

The World Editors Forum will be host to a ‘Study Tour’ of the UK this December, opened to senior editors from across the globe. The editors are invited to share ideas and information on all aspects of newspapers.

As The New York Times website turns free and WSJ.com considers the option, Follow the Media’s Philip Stone argues that print newspapers could follow the same model, generating revenues solely from advertising.

The number of free copies distributed by the Manchester Evening News (MEN), UK’s leading regional newspaper, has surpassed that of its sales for its paid-for edition. For better, despite initial fears of cannibalization.

The June 28 edition of the daily Edinburgh Evening News contained only positive news stories.  Under the title The Edinburgh "Evening Good News," the special edition aimed to interest readers by celebrating the local community and its events.

Network Rail has invited publishers and other interested parties to explore the launch of a new free afternoon or evening newspaper to be distributed at the Manchester Piccadilly station.  With the somewhat aggressive freesheet war already raging between The London Paper and its rival The London Lite, the addition of this new freebie will expand the competition outside London’s city limits.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister tabloid The Daily News now provides a vivid color summary of the paper within the paper. The feature will surely please readers on the move.

As free papers boom around the world, the freesheet market may be coming to saturation in their birthplace, Sweden. On the long term, there could be six total newspapers: two paid-for, two evening tabloid and two freesheets.

Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport is a healthy newspaper. January 2007 official data show that Gazzetta is the leading newspaper in the Italian market in terms of readership figures, with 3,603,000 daily readers. The general interest daily La Repubblica ranks second with a public of 3,015,000. Surveys also show that Gazzetta is the most read newspaper among Italians younger than 34. Since 1st February director Carlo Verdelli has scored a new record: his newspaper is the first sports daily to provide its readers with a selection of non-sport news.