What crisis? National/Metro vs Regional Newspapers.
I’m currently gathering information about the audiences for various media for a couple of projects. One’s about regional media, and it’s foreshadowed in my paper about regional public spheres, soon to be published in Communications, Politics and Culture. The other is about political fans, and I’m presenting on this topic soon in the seminar series of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I’ve done some interviews on that score, but I’m also trying to find out - across media - about how large the audience for “hardcore” public affairs content is.
Anyway, while trying to brush up some pretty rusty skills in quantitative data management and presentation, and gathering some figures on audiences across media, I discovered something today that seemed interesting.
That is: if we accept Morgan’s readership figures, it looks like the “crisis” of declining engagement with newspapers is pretty well entirely a metropolitan affair.
Here are a couple of graphs (produced in numbers - can’t access Excel from home!) I hope they visualise the claim above pretty clearly. They all deal with weekday readership of Australian newspapers.
The first shows the last two years of newspaper readership as per Morgan’s report last December. You’ll see I’ve divided up the market into national and metro papers and regional ones. I’ve included Hobart, The Gold Coast and Darwin in the regional group, not only because they approximate the profile of regional cities and media markets better than they do the 1 million people plus capitals, but because media industries treat them like regionals (in terms of ratings etc.). I’ve left Canberra in the metros section, partly because of its suburban profile, and partly because it’s the nation’s seat of power. I’m prepared to have a discussion about whether any of those decisions were wise!
What probably immediately strikes us here is the quantities metro and national papers sell in excess of regionals, but let’s leave that aside for a minute and focus on the changes in readership.
The next graph shows the readership of newspapers in 2008 and 2009 expressed as totals for national/metro and regional papers. Again, the metro totals dwarf the regionals, but you might note that while regional readership is basically flat, total metro readership can be seen to have declined a little.
We can compare the fate of individual national/metro papers and regionals a little more clearly if we look at changes in their readership in terms of percentages. This last graph offers percentage changes for newspapers, percentage changes for regionals and nationals/metros as a whole, and average changes in readership for nationals/metros.
This makes things clearer. Here we can see that all nationals/metros lost readers on weekdays between 2008 and 2009 except The Australian. Altogether, the nationals/metros lost around 5.9% of their readership, and on average they lost around 4.6%.
In the regions, though, it was a completely different story. Between 2008 and 2009, all told the regional newspapers remained steady, neither losing nor gaining readers. On average, they actually made a small gain in readership - around 0.75%.
Now we need to be cautious here - a lot of smaller regional and country newspapers aren’t included, I’ve got a lot more work to do across the range of statistics that Morgan and other organisations offer, and these are just building blocks in creating a more holistic view of regional mediascapes - the survey needs to be broader and longer.
That said: I’ve suggested more than once that the crisis of journalism has been getting a lot of airtime lately because metropolitan papers are in trouble, whereas the crisis in regional public spheres has happened over a much longer period, underneath the radar. This would need contextualising to connect to that argument, but the bit about the sudden decline in metro readerships looks pretty clear. What we see in this bunch of figures is a pretty profound change in the readership of national and metro papers over a year, accompanied by a steadiness in regional readerships. There’s more to do, but I reckon that’s a reasonably interesting outcome for an afternoon’s work.
Oh - NB the Gold Coast Bulletin dragging down the regional figures. If you took that paper out the differences would be even more stark, more so if you removed the outlier of the Australian from the national/metro story.
Certainly an interesting thought. I wonder though, given the apparent media crisis is often blamed on falling journalistic standards, whether the regional papers have just already hit rock bottom.
Many regional papers, especially the Illawarra Mercury (Mockery) are held up as examples of what a paper should not be - is it possible then that the readership remaining are either too loyal or have no alternatives, whereas metropolitan papers still have many border-line readers to shed?
I guess the statistics may never show this, but they certainly make you think….
I think it’s possible that you’re right on both counts - that some regional outlets have nowhere left to fall, and that some people don’t have alternatives. But I reckon stats like this can give us the grounding for good questions that we can confirm with further research (which may include talking to the audience in some more depth).
I am shocked and appalled that you have ignored The Border Mail.
Seriously though, I think that a lack of alternatives accounts for a lot of the resilience in regional papers along with the fact that they all, at least all the ones owned owned by fairfax, seem to have horrible websites that lag behind in publishing the day’s stories. Compare this to the majors where you can get the content quicker online than you can in the paper.
Cheers, Dave. The lack of the Border Mail is a serious issue - Morgan’s figures actually take in a limited range of regional papers.
But you may be right on the reasons - there’s also the underlying issue of diffusion of broadband and habits of online reading in regional areas. It will be interesting to see what happens with regional readerships post-NBN.
Jason, the question that jumps out at me is regarding how regional newspapers are of such poor quality. Is this question of ‘quality’ only a question of ‘hard news’? I raise the issue because I imagine that regional newspapers are the kind of media institution that serves many functions beyond the rarefied role of publishing ‘hard news’.
I’d be keen to read the ‘political fans’ paper as I won’t be able to make it to your seminar!
I still believe Morgan is right.
Hi,
Upon clicking to read your paper on Scribd, I was met with a notice informing me that the document is private, and thus off limits. Is this intentional? I’m interested in reading it. Thought-provoking stuff.