In August last year a consortium of Britain’s leading national newspaper publishers launched an advertising campaign to draw attention to the merits of their titles as platforms for advertising. It was an unprecedented initiative. The very fact that six highly competitive rivals were willing to bury their hatchets showed the depth of the problem. They needed advertisers, and most especially their media agencies who book ads for them, to think again about having turned their backs on newspapers. But the campaign failed.
Why should this be? Newspapers may be losing readers for their print versions, but they attract huge online audiences. The figures are a matter of record. And more than 7 million people still buy a newsprint paper in the UK each day while a further 2 million pick one up free.
Looking across both digital and print platforms, some 46 million people read a news brand each month. That is a mighty slice of the country’s overall population. As Rufus Olins, chief executive of Newsworks, the marketing body for national papers, points out, that is “even more than the number of people who use Google in the UK”. Advertisers surely know those figures but many are ignoring them.
For the full story by Roy Greenslade read The Guardian