How do British newspapers compare to Newsweek’s catastrophic 51% circulation collapse?

I felt a great disturbance on the internet last week, as if the voices of a million publishers suddenly cried out in terror. I think it was caused when people heard the figure that, on their way to becoming digital only, Newsweek had lost 51% of their print circulation in the space of just five years.

I eagerly awaited an article comparing that catastrophic loss of print sales with figures for newspapers in the UK. But I didn’t spot one if anyone did it, so I put my datajournalism hard-hat on and crunched the numbers myself.

Before somebody pipes up, I’m aware these figures can’t be an exact comparison. Newsweek was a weekly for a start, and in the UK some titles have closed, and others have sprung up. The calculation of ABC figures and the inclusion of bulk copies has also changed during that period. But I was just interested to see how close, or far away, British newspapers were from that horrendous 51% figure.

The good news?

The overall shrinking of the market in the same five year period in the UK has been nowhere near as much as 51%, it has been 27.4%

The bad news.

I just said the overall shrinking of the newspaper market in the last five years in the UK has been 27.4%

The biggest losers have been the Independent and Independent on Sunday, both with losses of 60%. The former, of course, is partly offset for the group by the launch of the i. If you combined sales of i and The Independent into one bundle, that would show a circulation increase of 41%.

The Guardian and Observer, where I used to work, have both lost 40% of their circulation. Other big losers have been the FT, Sunday Mail, The People and the Sunday Express, with over 35% of their sales disappearing. Actually, it says volumes about the state of the market that I’m not individually listing titles that have lost between 30% and 35% of their sales, because there are too many of them.

Across the five year period, amongst dailies, The Sun and Daily Mail have done the best at retaining circulation figures in percentage terms, and on Sundays it is the Star, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times that have coped best.

Out of interest, if you count News Of The World and The Sun (Sunday) as one paper, it would have lost 36.3% of readers.

Here are the numbers:

	August 2007	August 2012	% circulation loss
Daily papers
The Independent	198,916	62,773	68.4%
The Guardian	340,196	204,271	40.0%
The Financial Times	391,260	251,862	35.6%
Daily Record	414,312	274,408	33.8%
Daily Express	827,491	550,502	33.5%
Daily Mirror	1,582,290	1,088,724	31.2%
The Times	590,955	407,720	31.0%
Daily Star	825,522	600,304	27.3%
Daily Telegraph	799,152	584,089	26.9%
The Sun	3,158,045	2,502,691	20.8%
Daily Mail	2,228,321	1,796,876	19.4%
i	0	217,757	-
Sunday papers
News Of The World	3,352,154	0	100%
Independent On Sunday	172,637	67,948	60.6%
The Observer	413,035	246,245	40.4%
Sunday Mail	519,276	314,380	39.5%
The People	741,033	457,964	38.2%
Sunday Express	788,579	505,900	35.8%
Sunday Mirror	1,426,130	1,101,206	22.8%
Mail On Sunday	2,203,872	1,710,358	22.4%
Sunday Times	1,169,160	914,685	21.8%
Sunday Telegraph	586,353	463,733	20.9%
Daily Star Sunday	533,248	439,621	17.6%
The Sun (Sunday)	0	2,133,616	-
All papers
Total ABC sales	23,261,937	16,897,633	27.4%

From the apples and pears small print file...

In order to get the fairest comparison possible I’ve used the August 2007 figures that exclude bulks from this page and this page, and the August 2012 figures that excludes bulks from this page and this page on the Guardian site.