What newspaper crisis?

Much is made of the “crisis” in declining newspaper readership. And yet, if we accept Morgan’s figures, that is almost entirely a metropolitan affair.

Consider the figures on weekday readership from December. I’ve divided up the market into national and metro papers and regional ones. Hobart, the Gold Coast and Darwin are 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.

What probably immediately strikes us here is the quantities metro and national papers sell more than 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.

Here we can see that all nationals/metros lost readers on weekdays between 2008 and 2009 except The Australian. Altogether, the nationals/metros lost about 5.9% of their readership, and on average they lost about 4.6%.

In the regions, though, it was a different story. Between 2008 and 2009, all told the regional newspapers remained steady. On average, they actually made a small gain in readership — about 0.75%.

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 than 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.

But it’s clear the so-called crisis in journalism has been getting a lot of air time lately because metropolitan papers are in trouble. The crisis in regional public spheres has happened over a much longer period, underneath the radar. 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. As we debate the future of media, it’s an important distinction.

*Jason Wilson is a Lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. This originally appeared on his blog Gatewatching.