IN a week during which the Scottish MSM has sunk to new lows in terms of their bias and anti-Celtic agenda it is comforting to sit back this morning and consider the latest newspaper circulation figures.
THE year-on-year average newspaper circulations in Scotland according to the latest official ABC figures have been released and they make grim reading for the Scottish tabloid press.
Starting with Daily Record, their circulation is now well below 200,000 copies, having recorded another 10.1% drop. In August 2014 Daily Record was selling 203,941 copies per day. A year later and their circulation is down to an all-time low of 183,365.
Being a paperboy in the eighties, would mean delivering 85 Daily Records, 4 copies of the Daily Express and that was that. Apparently in the 70s the Daily Express was an equal of the Daily Record until they closed their Scottish offices and tried to publish the paper from England.
Their circulation fell away dramatically and never recovered. They had lost their audience and in August 2015 the Scottish Daily Express sold a mere 43,032 copies – down from 48,636 the previous year. This 11.5% drop continues the long term decline of a newspaper that lost the trust of its audience.
Is there a lesson for the Daily Record in what happened to the Express in Scotland?
The Scottish Sun (which wasn’t even quoted back in the 1980s) in recent years overtook the Record to firmly established as Scotland’s biggest selling tabloid. However that paper is also on a downward spiral and its percentage year on year fall is even steeper that that of the Daily Record.
The Scottish Sun recorded an 11.5% drop going down from 246,066 copies (Aug 2014) to 218,609 in August this year.
And the steep decline in Scottish newspaper sales is happening across all tabloids.
Daily Mirror suffered a 20.3 per cent drop, from 18,079 on average during August last year, to 14,398 last month.
Daily Star of Scotland suffered a 13.2 per cent drop, from 41,799 to 36,267 while the Scottish Daily Mail fell 3.5 per cent,from 93,321 to 90,010 and so on.
Meanwhile, the Sunday titles’ sales figures in Scotland were actually worse!
Sunday Mail declined by another 12.5 per cent falling from 231,821 copies to 202,922. They must be relieved to be above 200,000 copies per week. It looks however just a matter of time. Remember the days when Sunday Mail sold over 500,000 copies every week?
The Scottish Sun on Sunday, which replaced the disgraced News of The World, fell another 11.2 per cent, down from 175,525 to a mere 155,928 copies.
*Source: ABC, September 2015. Please note: The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, The Herald and the Sunday Herald now appear in the twice-yearly ABC regional newspapers report.
