Print circulations of Australian masthead newspapers have continued their sales decline according to the latest audit figures with all but one of the 42 titles recording a fall.
It was particularly bad news for Fairfax with its flagship titles The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and The Canberra Times all recording close to or more than double digit fall in sales.
The weekly edition of The SMH fell 9.1 per cent to 104,155. The weekly edition of The AFR fell 10.5 per cent to 51,425 while the weekly edition of The Canberra Times was smashed a whopping 18.7 per cent to 18,837. The weekend editions all suffered falls but not of the same magnitude.
According to today’s ABCs Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph is Australia’s most bought newspaper with sales of 452,377. Although it was also down five per cent on the previous six months.
Arguably the biggest highlight was News Corp’s The Australian and its weekend version – both suffering only modest declines. The weekly version dropped 2.6 per cent to 102,068 while the weekend edition was down just 1.2 per cent to 224,691.
The other highlights (or lowlights) was Perth’s Sunday Times dropping 10.2 per cent, the Saturday version of The Gold Coast Bulletin was down 9.1 per cent while the weekly version of The Age – in more worrying news for Fairfax – was down 8.7 per cent.
Arguably the only highlight of the audit – if you could indeed call it that – was The Northern Territory News’ weekday edition adding an additional 58 readers for a 0.4 per cent increase to 13,728.
