Where have all the readers gone?

I spent most of my business life in the publishing business working for national magazines and newspapers. I met an old colleague recently and as old colleagues do, we fell to reminiscing about the days of high circulations. After we parted I thought about the subject a little more. The magazine business deliberately broadened the range and number of titles on offer so it was obvious that the high circulations would suffer. But that was, it seems, a planned programme. Newspapers seem to have arrived at a situation where they are caught in a downward spiral of sales that they simply cannot control and certainly didn't plan, but why? What has caused such a collapse in sales of what is after all a traditional part of every home, the newspaper? I look at it this way.
If you bought a bar of chocolate, or anything else for that matter, and found that it wasn't to your taste, would you buy the same brand again? If you were with a group of people with whom you were fundamentally at odds and found their company disagreeable, would you make an effort to get involved with them again? Would you recommend to someone else a book or a show that you hadn't enjoyed? I put the questions because the collapse in the daily circulation figures of National Newspapers over the past few years must surely indicate that whatever attracted readers in the past is now missing. Why else would people stop buying them? Cost? Maybe partly, but only a small part. I think the reason is more fundamental and more to do with the function of newspapers in the modern media market place.
I came into Fleet Street in the early sixties when I joined the London Evening News Classified Department. The industry was run by giants, Cecil King, Cudlipp, Beaverbrook, Rothermere, all had opinions, none were shy about airing them. The total number of newspapers sold every day was over fifteen million, the Daily Mirror was selling over 4.5 million a day having recently overtaken the Express, though it was a close run thing. I never dreamed that one day I would be responsible for maintaining that figure! Despite these enormous figures the big worry voiced by everyone I spoke to at the time was that commercial television would kill newspapers because it would take all the advertising revenue. But the pundits were wrong! Newspapers not only learned to live with the new medium, they learned how to use it to their advantage. By 1966 total sales still exceeded fifteen and a half million a day, and the Mirror, happy days, was selling over five million.
It wasn't until I joined the Daily Mirror to help with the launch of Mirror Magazine that the sheer size and importance of newspapers really became clear to me. Until then I had been involved with magazines. I stared at the stack of ten million copies of The Mirror Magazine in a warehouse at Odhams Watford. Ten million of anything is impressive but that sight was awesome! I was told that the weight was so great it caused a crack in the floor of the warehouse. The big total daily sales figures continued right up the turn of the millennium only dropping from 15 to 14 millions a day. Some titles did close, The Sketch, Chronicle, and others, new titles took their place. But readers' tastes, likes and dislikes were clearly changing and whilst the overall figure of newspaper sales continued at a very high level, those changes caused dramatic movement from one title to another.
Since then despite the growth in the size and make-up of the population, and vastly improved production and distribution techniques, the falls continue and, I am told by those who should know, are expected to continue falling. Currently the overall sales figure is just over 11 million a day, The Sun leads the field with The Mail second, repeating it's sixties level and the Mirror following a long way behind, The Express is almost out of sight. No doubt the internet will be regarded as the cause of the flight from the printed word, just as television was all those years ago. I have my doubts about that. Most people can and do use a computer these days, even greybeards like me, but there is no substitute for holding a newspaper or a book in your hands, feeling the substance of the paper, absorbing the import of the reports, comment, opinions, and beliefs of the people who wrote it. The printed word remains one of the cornerstones of the freedom of speech, the electronic image is transitory and in my opinion, will never be as comfortable to read. I really hope that newspapers discover how to live with and use the new media to their advantage, that circulations will steady and perhaps even rise again. Well it happened before!