How did the News of the World closure affect newspaper circulation?

Ed Vaizey: "After the closure of the News of the World I think about half of the News of the World readers have stopped buying a Sunday newspaper at all."

Paul Nuttall: "There are a million less people at the moment buying a newspaper on a Sunday."

BBC Question Time, 23 February 2012

With the birth of the Sun on Sunday just a few days away, BBC's Question Time programme this week concluded with a short discussion over whether Rupert Murdoch's decision to launch the new paper was a good thing for British journalism.

It led to reflection from some, namely Ed Vaizey and Paul Nuttall, on the damage done to newspaper buying by the closure of the News of the World (NotW) in July last year.

So what are the figures?

Analysis

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) provide data on the circulations of national and regional newspapers, as well as a number of magazines. These are regularly reported by the Press Gazette.

Crucially, these figures concern circulations, or purchases, of the newspapers and cannot precisely account for readers. So we can only at best approximate Mr Vaizey's claim.

Examining the figures for each month in last year up to January this year demonstrates how the circulations of the major Sunday publications have changed:

As has been reported, the apparent beneficiaries of the News of the World closure were the Sunday Mirror, and to a lesser extent the Mail on Sunday, The People and the Daily Star Sunday. The Mail on Sunday has since returned to pre-closure levels.

Examining the total circulations of these publications, in June 2011 they collectively circulated 9,279,222 copies. In July, following the NotW's closure, this total fell to 8,563,825. By August, it rallied slightly to 8,683,278.

Paul Nuttall's claim that a million fewer people buy a newspaper on Sunday have good grounds looking at these newspapers alone. If we compare the most recent total to that of January last year, there are around 1.7 million fewer buyers.

Even factoring in three major Scottish publications: The Sunday Post, Scotland on Sunday and Herald, shows that these papers have seen declines of their own.

Since June last year, the last available data before the News of the World's closure, there are 1.4 million fewer on the circulation figures.

So whether we compare this January's circulation figures with those of January 2011, or measure the decline between June and July specifically, we can see that there has been a drop of more than one million in the number of papers sold.

But have half of the NotW's readers stopped buying a Sunday newspaper altogether?

Obviously, the ABC figures cannot tell us exactly what individual readers are buying and so the data can only give an indication of where those buyers might be.

Since the News of the World closed, there are 1.4 million fewer purchases of Sunday newspapers - that is the decline from June 2011 to January 2012. Examining figures a year before, from June 2010 to January 2011, showed a comparable decline of 213,000 copies. A year previous still, from June 2009 to January 2010, saw a decline of 539,000 copies.

So a 1.4 million decline from June to January is certainly larger than other drops in recent year, and  can't be entirely accounted for by a longer-term trend of falling circulations.

Alternately, taking the immediate aftermath of the closure, 715,000 fewer copies were sold across all the Sunday titles between June and July last year. This bucks the trend from the previous year, when there was in fact an increase of 121,000 copies sold. 2009 also saw an increase of 70,000 copies.

So just taking the June to July period shows that a month-on-month decline of 715,000 copies is unprecedented in recent years.

Conclusion

Determining how many of the former News of the World buyers have stopped buying a Sunday paper altogether is not possible. All the indications however show that the overall decline following the closure is unprecedented.

For Mr Vaizey to be correct, around 1.3 million former buyers need to have stopped reading a newspaper. While 1.4 million fewer copies have been sold since June last year, some of this may be due to the more long-standing declines in sales. It is nevertheless conceivable that approaching half of the former buyers of the NotW have moved out of the Sunday newspaper market altogether.

We will of course wait to see whether the new Sun on Sunday will be able to claw back some of these lost readers, or whether it will merely absorb existing readers from the other Sunday titles.