OPEN

Peter Preston’s puts the idea that newspapers are dying under close scrutiny in his column in today’s Observer Business & Media section and discovers that while some titles – the Express, Mirror etc. – are in decline others- Sunday qualities- are surviving and even growing:

And as for the kind of newspaper you’re reading now, a quality
Sunday or a quality daily, the statistics tell a quite surprising
story. Put the five quality dailies – the Telegraph, Times, Guardian,
Independent and FT – together in a single top-of-the-range sector and
they sold 2,640,000 between them last month. In April 1966, that sector
produced 2,060,000 in sales; in April 1976, 2,112,000; in 1986,
2,387,000; and, in April 1996, a record 2,650,000.

In
short, there’s been growth most of the time through four full decades,
and any slippage over the past 10 years – just 10,000 copies – is
insignificant. The most consistent headline story is one of titles
increasing in number while their pagination goes swelling. As for the
blight of the internet, real or anticipated, the years since April
1996, which are also the years of the net’s explosion, betray scant
sign of collapse. Our quality national daily sector may be mature as
industries go, but nemesis would seem to be a long time coming.

The
quality Sunday market runs pretty parallel with that, too. Copies sold
last month: 2,779,000; April 1966, 2,924,000; April 1976, 2,805,000;
1986, 2,538,000. And 10 years ago the Sunday sector sold 2,702,000
copies. It’s grown a bit, not shrunk a bit.

A useful reminder to those of us spending a lot of time with new media that print still has an audience and still has influence…