A declining industryMonday 14 May 2012  The last time we looked, for instance, the circulation of The Times newspaper had dropped to the daily average of 413,233, a year-on-year loss of 11.38 percent. Four months later, the same paper is selling 393,187 copies a day, representing an increased rate of loss at 12.59 percent, year-on-year. For The Times this is a particularly savage blow, as the expected result of Murdoch's paywall strategy was that it would prompt an immediate rise in readers buying printed issues. The immediate response, following the introduction of the paywall in July 2010 was a fall in circulation, with it dropping below the half-million mark on August 2010 (494,205). Then, having cut its cover price to 50p, the Daily Mail registered a circulation of 2,169,690, a 2.45 percent increase on July and its best circulation figure of the year. But now it stands at 1,991,275 copies a day – not quite the same precipitate fall, but a decline nonetheless. At the turn of the century, the paper was doing 2.35 million sales a day. This illustrates a more general trend , right across the board, where decline in sales is universal and well-established. In August 2010, for instance, The Guardian, already in the decline, was selling 272,112 copies a day. November 2011 saw it selling 226,473. This April, by contrast, sees 214,128 copies a day, representing a year-on-year-decline of 18.86 percent. The turn of the century saw it selling 401,560 copies a day, and it was to peak two years later (2002) at 411,386. In ten years, its circulation has nearly halved. Another of the so-called quality newspapers, The Daily Telegraph was making 673,010 sales a day in August 2010. It managed only 594,644 in November 2011, and in April this year could only make 576,790 average daily sales, representing a year-on-year fall of 9.82 percent. This century, the paper peaked in 2001, with copies at 1,022,263 a day being sold. Its current circulation level is not so very far from a fifty percent decline, in just over ten years. But in 1980, it was doing 1.44 million copies a day, compared with the Mail's 1.95 million. The Sundays, over the recent period, are showing declines similar to those of their daily counterparts.The Sunday Telegraph on November last was doing 465,389 copies a day. Now it is down to 455,378 per day, from its all-time record in 1980 of 1,017,000 copies, and from its 21st century peak of 822,931 in 2001. You have to go back to 1966, however, to see the peak for the Observer, when it topped out at 881,000 copies each Sunday. The turn of the century saw it decline to 416,460 and now it stands at a pitiful 252,802, representing a 16.61 percent year-on-year decline. Still, of course, the newspapers are reaching huge numbers of people, but the industry is unmistakably in decline, and with it goes its authority. In ten years' time, some of the titles we see on the news stands will no longer exist. However, given their current standard of writing, their choice of writers and their lacklustre grasp of the issues, their authority will have dissipated long before that. Sadly, when they finally disappear in physical form, they will not be missed. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 14/05/2012 |
Pain for Merkel Monday 14 May 2012  Her party, the CDU, saw support plunge to just 26.3 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War II. The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 39.1 percent of the vote and will have enough seats to form a stable majority with the Greens. Turnout is not specified. Slightly more promising, Merkel's coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), scored a better-than-expected 8.3 percent, having bombed in elections last year. But all this is to no avail as the SPD and Greens strengthening their postion. The leader here is SPD's Hannelore Kraft, a tram-worker's daughter, and there is now talk that she could become the SPD's candidate to challenge Merkel in the 2013 general election. German media commentators say the defeat is largely attributable to the weakness of the CDU's candidate for state governor, Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, and that Merkel will be much harder to defeat in the 2013 general election. Nevertheless, they also say that the result is likely to make her left-wing opposition less ready to compromise on the ratification of the fiscal pact. For that, Merkel needs a two-thirds majority in parliament and, at the very least, the Social Democrats and Greens are likely to demand concessions in return for supporting it. All of this does not particularly help with Tuesday's visit to Berlin by Hollande, who is expected to urge Merkel to shift away from austerity and place more emphasis on growth-oriented measures in Europe. Other countries like Italy also want Merkel to take a more balanced approach to the debt crisis. Die Welt is now saying that the earth is starting to tremble under Angela Merkel. But, if the SPD now thinks that, in alliance with the Greens, it will march to victory in the 2013 general election, its optimism is unfounded. Hannelore Kraft remained under 40 percent against a weak opponent in a state that has long been an SPD bastion, and the Greens barely gained any ground. Red-Green is back in power thanks to Röttgen's weakness. And nationwide, Merkel is an opponent of an altogether different calibre." COMMENT THREAD Richard North 14/05/2012 |
More exit signs Monday 14 May 2012  Everybody's at it now, with Roger Bootle writing under the headline: "The final death throes of the euro". "The euro crisis is entering its final stages", he says. "Economic pain is now interacting with political resistance to produce intense financial pressure. I expect Greece to leave the euro – and perhaps very soon". With all these clever people saying so, I suppose it must be true. But my money is still on the autumn. COMMENT: "EXIT SIGNS" THREAD Richard North 14/05/2012 |
Something odd going on Monday 14 May 2012 Writing posts on this site can amounts to the intellectual equivalent of being chained to a treadmill, so it is easy to get in a rut or be trapped by one's own obsessions and prejudices. The reality check from readers' comments, on the forum, by e-mail and face-to-face, provide an important reality check. Reading a selection of blogs is also an important corrective, not least to find out what others consider important. And if this site is going too far, or becoming too extreme, there are other views which can drag us back. In this context, I had some slight reservations about our renewed assault on Myrtle, and wondered about the Failygraph attack on its own readers. However, I'm more than a little comforted by Raedwaldand his reference to the "unprecedented piece of whiny brown-nosing by Hannan at the weekend", and then there is always Witterings from Witney, Autonomous Mind and others. AM's contribution is especially interesting, as he points to ructions within the back benches of the Tories, with increasing indications of grumbling in the ranks over the poor performance of The Great Leader. The Jeremy Hunt hunt is also taking on an interesting dimension and, on the back of the election crash, Cameron is looking distinctly besieged. Perhaps that is the reason by the Failygraph hacks are rallying round, with Bruce Anderson latest in the brown-nose stakes, telling us that there is "no abler or stronger leader than Cameron in any major country". Clearly though, most voters don't agree. Ed Miliband is currently enjoying a higher approval rating in the polls than Cameron. This was a Sunday Times poll, which had 32 percent saying Miliband was doing well against 55 percent saying he is doing badly, giving a net approval rating of minus 23. That beat Cameron’s score of minus 29. It comes to something when politicians can only attract minus scores, and the winner is the one who attracts less minuses, but The Boy has to be doing incredibly badly if he can't even kick Miliband Jr into touch. With that, you would expect some action by the Tories – the party always has been pretty ruthless with losers – but with the preposterous Osborne also in trouble, there seem to be more than the usual undercurrents at play. What precisely that "more" might be is not easy to pin down, but there are turbulent waters ahead. Something odd is going on, and it bodes no good. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 14/05/2012 |
More exit signs Monday 14 May 2012 A "massive" economic impact awaits Britain should the eurozone fail to contain the turmoil sweeping the continent, the Vince Cable is warning. This we are told, from the depths of the Murdochian paywall, is "the bleakest prediction of the UK's economic vulnerability to date" by a senior minister. And Cable also says that there was little Britain could do apart from hope the eurozone's economic firewalls were strong enough to stop Greece's problems from spreading. You can tell a lot from the mood music. It doesn't tell you what is happening. It does not always help you predict what might happen. But it does tell you what people think might happen. And from this, it does seem that the time is near, more so with The Times telling us that "policymakers need to plan for Greece's exit from the euro and encourage structural reform elsewhere". You get the feeling that we're most definitely not all in this together. The joke of the day is two men in a boat: one says, you row if you want. I'll just swim for the bank. And that's as good as it gets. COMMENT: "EXIT SIGNS" THREAD Richard North 14/05/2012 |
Swansong of the dinosaurs Sunday 13 May 2012 It has always been my view that, as a blogger, the main purpose is to develop understanding of the issues and engage with those who can set us straight if we have it wrong. Qanagate, Amazongate, and the sordid little incident surrounding Pachauri have seriously put this blog through its paces where we have had to go the extra mile, facing extreme criticism, sometimes from quarters we consider allies, in order to make our case. What we have never done is dismissed our readers or ignored them. Some of the most groundbreaking revelations have come to us through reader engagement and if that isn't the point of blogging, then I don't know what is. That is what we have always considered to be the crucial difference between the blogosphere and the legacy media. The latter has proven itself incapable of reader engagement. Readers are simply a commodity to be harvested to demonstrate the pageview statistics to their corporate sponsors. Ignoring their readers is one thing (we are quite used to that), however I am beginning to notice a trend emerging where the Failygraph is actively attacking its readers. I’ve just had an epiphany. Everybody is wrong about everything. No one gets anything right.We don't have a good word to say about any of those things, it's true. But it's all part of the same problem: a political class and a media establishment long past its sell by date. If commenters seem a little harsh, I think that says more about Failygraph hacks than it does the readers. Peter North 13/05/2012 |
Exit signs Sunday 13 May 2012 Europe is "certainly more resilient" to a Greek exit than it was two years ago, when the eurozone would have been "massively underprepared", the EU economic and monetary commissioner, Olli Rehn, has told a conference in Estonia. But, he says: "it would be much worse for Greece and Greek citizens, especially less well-off Greek citizens, if Greece left the euro than for Europe. Europe also would suffer, but Greece would suffer more." A Greek exit from the euro could be "technically" managed, but would damage confidence in the monetary union, said Patrick Honohan, an ECB governing council member. A Greek departure would be "destabilising" for the rest of the euro area, and all sides are trying to avoid it, he said. "It is not necessarily fatal, but it is not attractive". COMMENT THREAD Richard North 13/05/2012 |
A lack of emotional intelligence Sunday 13 May 2012  The leader writer is highly entertained by the fate of torch. Freshly kindled, it entered the ancient stadium [in Athens] to begin its journey to these shores, when a strong gust of wind snuffed it out. But what it misses completely is that the torch relay is a modern artefact invented by Hitler's Nazisfor the glorification of the Third Reich. Everything about the ceremony is false, so the acceptance at face value of the vainglorious posturing perhaps illustrates much more about the state of our politics and people than the paper might like to admit. The leader itself, though, deals with what John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday calls the "babyish demand for a referendum", although he is the last person on this earth to be in a position to throw stones. As an alternative, this pompous fart tells us that we should instead "start arguing for what they really believe about the costs and benefits of Britain's membership of the EU". Yet, a cost-benefit analysis of our membership of the EU is precisely what eurosceptics have been demanding for many moons, and it is precisely that which europhiles like Rentoul have been so keen to avoid. Nevertheless, being a pompous fart does not make him entirely wrong about all things (even if he gets close), and he is right to question the growing referendum meme, as lacking in substance. Indeed, it is one of those mad memes so beloved of the chatterati. Maybe it is filling the gap in those empty lives which used to be entertained by speculation on early general elections or whether Tony Blair was going to resign and become president of the United States [of Europe]. This does not stop the Sunday Failygraph running with the meme though. Its political acumen and insight is about as lightweight as the daily, so it is arguing, in the context of the eurozone crisis, that "it is time for the Government to assemble a blueprint for what our relationship with Europe should look like once the dust has settled". It is this fatuity against which my erstwhile editor has so often railed, pointing out that we do not have a relationship with "Europe". Neither do we have one with the European Union. We are in the European Union, we are part of it, the treaties are part of the country's constitution. Essentially, on that basis, there are only two question which can sensibly be addressed: whether we remain in the EU, or get out. There is no middle way, and there never has been. But the babyish Sunday Failygraph still clings, limpet-like to the unreality, sharing also the brain-cell count and IQ of this mollusc. The question now is, it says, "should we stay in the EU and renegotiate, or leave and pursue a future of bilateral relationships around the world?" For this dismal, stupid, venal leader-writer, the "turmoil and trauma within the eurozone and what will follow" offers "the perfect opportunity to decide". And there comes his babyish idea of a referendum, giving The Boy the "mandate" from the people. Thus armed, we are advised, "the Prime Minister could truly speak for Britain". This infantile view of the world is staggering. Not least, anyone with the emotional intelligence of a two-year-old or more would instantly realise that they are onto a loser. To approach the "colleagues" when they are embroiled in euro fallout, demanding renegotiation of the treaties, is going to get nowhere. Even if it was a starter during the good times, now and for the many months to come would be the worst of all times. But the singular point is that to "stay in the EU and renegotiate" is not, never has been and never will be an option. We either stay in, or we leave. Only in the latter case do we then negotiate a relationship with what is left of the EU. For all these many years, neither the Tories nor their media claque can deal with this basic truth. Instead, despite being told again and again and again, they return to their lame stupidity, determined to the end to yearn after something that is not on offer and can never happen. Perhaps I have hit upon the truth here. It is not intelligence, as such, that is lacking, but emotional intelligence: the complete inability to see things from outside "self", and the failure to understand that "wants" in a grown-up world cannot always be granted. These silly, babyish little people (how right Rentoul is in his choice of epithet) need to realise that occasionally, when nanny says "no", she actually means it, because that is the way it has to be. Running to mummy or daddy isn't going to make any difference. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 13/05/2012 |
Posts
But thinking about it, this is the second Failygraph blog post I've seen today where the author was belittling reader contributions. Daniel Hannan earlier was saying something along the lines of "la la la, I can't hear you. Dave Cam is A-OK and you're all stupid if you disagree".
I'm not going to waste even a moment deconstructing this deluded rubbish (feel free if you like), but it does speak volumes about their total contempt for their readers. They don't like the message so they attack it, instead of listening to it. I guess that is why the Failygraph and the political class it scribbles for is awaiting the imminent arrival of the fat lady.
COMMENT THREAD