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One thing really never made sense when Edouard de Rothschild, scion of one of the most famous conservative banking families in Europe, invested some €20 million in the far-to-the left Liberation newspaper 13 months ago, promising to keep his fingers out of editorial control. What did he expect to get for his money? The answer is now in – get your foot in the door and eventually you’ll get what you really want.
The good news coming from this year’s annual World Press Trends Report is that global newspaper sales still eked out some growth last year, and advertising sales continued strong in some areas, but the surge of readers to the Internet continues to have its affect, even in market-leader Asia.
No sooner does Poland’s Agora drop its three-month-old up market Nowy Dzien (New Day) because shareholders were up in arms over its losses, then along comes Axel Springer saying it is launching its own upscale broadsheet in Warsaw on April 18, with the paper said to be modeled on Springer’s successful Die Welt brand in Germany.
Iceland, a country with just under 300,000 population has a battle royal going on between free newspapers. Frettabladid, which has been around four years, leads with 99,000 mostly home delivered copies daily, and Bladid, a free mail-delivered tabloid that started in May this year, distributes 80,000. That means enough free newspapers are available to satisfy about 64% of Iceland’s total population.
It was September, 1993. Circulation of the Times broadsheet was continuing its spiral downwards with no end in sight, so owner Rupert Murdoch resorted to that old standby in times of circulation crisis – he cut the newsstand price by 30%. That single move is credited today, 12-years later, with causing such a financial bloodbath for all of the UK national quality broadsheets that they have yet to recover fully. And it also literally changed the face of most British quality national newspapers.
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