PCC
JRN - 185
Newspaper Publishing
● Why Newspapers remain so strong:
○ Jeremy Tunstall:
○ Argued that newspapers remained strong in the video era
○ Writing before the internet became the force it is today
○ The advent of television had significantly increased the importance of mass media
around the world, but wide political and social influence television had added to,
and not subtracted from, the general press and newspapers
● Newspapers, he wrote, exercised a continuing prerogative both for biasing the news
and slanting the comment'
○ Newspapers, not television, that go for the jugular of the leader
○ Usually the newspaper that first spills the blood of the politician; only then will
TV dive in for the replay of action
○ Fewer people now read a daily newspaper every day but maybe three or four days
a week
○ Each newspaper was much fatter than it was a few decades ago
○ In an era of semi-regular newspaper reading, said Tunstall
○ Still towering and stooping over the scattered digital media, the somewhat
reduced TV networks and the somewhat arthritic daily papers
○ ‘Semi-regular' reading has increased
○ Reality masked by the release of newspaper circulation figures that average daily
sales over the six days of publication
○ Saturday newspaper sales are significantly greater than Monday to Friday sales,
especially at the 'higher' end of the market
○ Without the supplement packed on Saturdays, more akin to Sunday newspapers
than those published on other days of the week under the same title, national
dailies' sales will look even worse than circulation figures say
○ Example: The Guardian, which averages an audited selling of about 350,000 for
all six publishing days, sells about 200,000 more copies on a Saturday than on all
other days of the week
○ The factness is evident, with all national newspapers spawning more and more
pages, particularly at the top end of the market once again
○ The number of words in one edition of the Sunday Times or Observer, or
Saturday Guardian or Telegraph, will be equivalent to that of many novels
● Resulted in the impression that news has been reduced to obscurity
○ In most instances, there is at least as much news or content provided as news in
news pages