The remarkable resilience of printed words on paper pages
Ideas and life, wit and opinion still sell newspapers and magazines
The slipway to extinction for the printed press doesnt seem quite as well-greased as digital soothsayers suppose. The latest ABC print sale audit shows national papers down only 2.8% year on year and a mere 0.79% on Brexit June. All three quality Sundays the Observer, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times sold more copies last month than in July 2015.
And a look at ABCs six-monthly report (print and online) on 174 of Britains biggest magazines seems to tell a familiar story. Theres an average drop of 5.2% year on year to be sure more grist for the gloom-mongers mill yet look a little deeper.
Youll find a lot of winners among the losers: try House Beautiful, Harpers Bazaar and Esquire. But theres also a cluster of solid performers gaining a little and losing nothing. Heres the Economist in the UK, up 3.7%; the incredibly resilient Private Eye, up 0.8%; The Week, up 0.7%; Prospect, up 3.3%; the Oldie, up 0.6%; the Times Literary Supplement, up 7.8%. And bouncing on dramatic internet expansion theres the Spectator, up 37.9%.
In short, opinion, reportage, analysis and wit still find a market. Words, not pictures. Ideas, not celebrity mush. Life, not lists. Just thought Id mention it.
Gawker gawn
Last month, Gawker Media was American publishings 16th-biggest website, with 434m page views overall. This week, the Gawker gossip site (Private Eye with a tabloid twist) that began it all will be dead and buried closed by the cumulative weight of third-party lawsuits funded by a vigilante Silicon Valley billionaire with his own agenda. Good riddance to bad rubbish? You can piously say so if you wish. But goodbye, too, to a great deal of sharp, necessary and often brave reporting. Life on the edge not merely punished, but extinguished.
Trumps Nige and Roger show
What do you do if youre Donald Trump and youre losing? You persuade Stephen Bannon, top dog at Breitbart News, the rightwing web news site that loves Nigel Farage, to run your campaign (I have been fought at every step of the way by total amateurs who come to London once a month with sandwiches in their rucksacks, to attend Ukip NEC meetings that normally last seven hours, writes a plangent Farage). You get Roger Ailes, the hangdog ex-monarch of Fox News to rehearse you for TV debates. And what if that doesnt work either? Maybe hire Nigel direct. He knows a bit about winning after all.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/21/newspaper-magazine-abcs-gawker-trump-bannon
