In another special guest post from The National's media maven, Keach Hagey, Beep Beep takes a look at how the seemingly doomed newspaper (printed on paper, sold at corner stores) is having a major
moment here in the UAE. Over to you, Keach:
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Just in time for Halloween, the US newspaper industry got some seriously scary news yesterday. Average weekday circulations for daily newspapers dropped 10.6 per cent in the six months that ended Sept 30, the biggest drop that the Audit Bureau of Circulations has ever recorded. The doom is ever-faster approaching: the rate of decline more than doubled compared to last year. And as Alan Mutter at Reflections of A Newsosaur notes, the percentage of Americans who buy a newspaper every day has dropped to 12 per cent, a low that hasn't been since since before World War II. Yikes!
We
all know that papers in the UAE, for all their groaning about the loss
of real estate advertising, are sitting pretty. Just how pretty is
always a bit blurry, since only three daily papers -- Gulf News, 7 Days,
and Akbar al Khaleej -- are audited. But a look at the circulation
figures of the UAE's largest English-language daily paper gives a hint
about the state of the industry here.
Yes, Gulf News lost a bit of
circulation between March and June of this year (from 126,320 to
123,444), but both of those figures are strongly up from September of
2008 (118,584), which should have been the last happy moment for
newspapering, or at least newspaper ad sales teams. Not only did Gulf
News build circulation during a major downturn in ad sales, but it also
built it at a time when it faced a challenge from The National that,
according to recent Ipsos data paid for by The National, knocked
several percentage points off its marketshare.
All this means that while newspaper publishers might not be getting as rich as they used to, at least in the UAE people are reading dead-tree editions more than ever -- an incredibly rare and lucky place to be these days, particularly for a market with the kind of readership demographics that the UAE enjoys.
