There’s little festive cheer for the newspaper industry if the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures are anything to go by.

Sales of popular dailies shrank by 5% in November 2006 compared to the same month a year earlier. For mid-markets and qualities the decline was 2.2% and 2.5% respectively. And in the Sunday market, the drop was even more pronounced with an across-the-board decline of 6.2%, driven mainly by a slump in sales of the popular titles.

This is the result of many now-familiar factors including the growth of free newspapers, cheap and popular alternative entertainment sources like MP3 players and increasingly multi-functional mobile phones, and of course the fact that people are spending more time online.

All the more reason why the PR industry needs to encourage clients to treat web sites and blogs as important campaign targets, especially if they want to reach youth audiences.

For more on the ABCs check out the Media Guardian website.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 9:20 am by Helen Nowicka and is filed under PR and Marcomms, Print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.