The People (unreadable) has dropped over 13% in the last year - to just over 700,000 copies!

We have more readers in a month here!

News of the World? Down over 6%.

Even the Sun and the Mail have dropped nearly 3%... bye bye tabloids.

I use the latter three as reference, the former, i do not recall ever buying, although back in the 70`s as a paper boy, I loved it`s readers and hated Sunday Times readers.
This was purely a weight thing though, at the time.

How ironic....!

Mart

The People and the Mirror are lighter - because they use smaller, shorter words !

Could this be partly because they are all online? I hardly ever buy newspapers because of this. The same news is all there, the only ommission might be the scoop picture of some actress showing her tits whilst on holiday. You have to buy the paper to see those.

Also the online news channels are so full of info and much easier to read surreptitiously whilst pretending to work!

I expect one day you will have to start paying subscriptions to read the news online

The tabloids are dying. Haven't bought a paper for years. I can get all I want online. News, I can even watch television online, does that exempt me from the license fee? When I see someone buying a newspaper I just think 'Why waste 50p?' I'm presuming the red tops must be about 50p now?

I would be interested in knowing how the sales of the more "quality" end of the market is holding up before proffering a theory on this.

I suppose the press has a similar challenge to the music industry in facing up to the challenges posed by the internet. Maybe producing quality instead of tat would be a start, but that notion falls apart if The Guardian/Times etc are also losing out.

And they are I'm afraid Anthony; virtually all papers are in circulation freefall.

Ah well, it would have been nice to think the tabloids were the masters of their own downfall through their salacious inaccurate reporting, but it looks like we're back to the old chestnut of the internet.

I can't see the option of them charging us to read their online output has much mileage, as there are so many news outlets out there which I would imagine will remain free.

I have no answers for them, so the Press Barons had better get their thinking caps on fast!

UK printed media pretty much all have an online edition which does have a contribution to revenues from advertising and such like. I think it's fair to say though that it's not because of the low brow, sex obsessed content that the tabloids are failing. The times they are a changing.

You'll see that the House of Murdoch though is buying Dow Jones which gives it access to strong business content which it can 'monetize' in the face of margin pressure elsewhere in the Murdoch media empire.

What is quite possibly more lamentable than the downfall of the tabloids though is the corporatisation of the Internet before we've really had the opportunity to enjoy it as a cyber space wild west - don't forget the House of Murdoch now includes MySpace and the pressure to censor grows at a pace....