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Why, yes it is. But less important to them than losing the BSkyB merger. Or, it would seem, Rebekah Brooks. And the paper was largely finished by this point. N
by v21 15y ago
Why, yes it is. But less important to them than losing the BSkyB merger. Or, it would seem, Rebekah Brooks.
And the paper was largely finished by this point. No advertisers, no readers, an utterly tarnished brand...
But yes, the Beeb has just reported that employees will be placed at other titles within NI. But I would be surprised if they didn't still lose some headcount. After all, most newspapers have been trying to shed employees the last few years. The announcement that they were going to merge some functions between The Sun and the News Of The World was largely motivated by that.
- speckledjim 15y ago> No advertisers, no readers, an utterly tarnished brand... hmm where do you get that from? All sources point to NOTW having the highest readership of any sunday paper. eg http://www.nrs.co.uk/toplinereadership.html http://www.nrs.co.uk/toplinereadership.html
- cstross 15y agoYesterday's news: "Procter & Gamble, Asda and Tesco consider pulling News of the World ads Coca-Cola GB and other major brands voice concerns as Halifax, Co-op, Vauxhall and Virgin Hollidays join ad exodus" -- The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-world-advertising http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-worl... Let me emphasize, that was yesterday. The trickle turned into a flood and then a tsunami today: by the time NewsCorp announced the closure of "News of the World" they only had one major advertiser left on board.
- speckledjim 15y agoHow did I know you'd be citing the Grauniad... They have by far the highest readership of any sunday paper. That wouldn't evaporate overnight.
- regularfry 15y agoThe readers don't pay for the paper. The advertisers do.
- speckledjim 15y agoFWIW, The paper costs £1, so with a readership of 7 million or so every week... That's around £350m / year. The top advertiser, Sky, spends £2m a year with the paper. So I find it hard to believe that advertisers are all that important.
- eftpotrm 15y agoMinus the cut to the retailer, minus the cut to the distributor, minus the cost of printing the thing... The income from advertisers is a much higher percentage of the paper's income than you think.
- SandB0x 15y agoWell, the Metro and Evening Standard are given away for free in London each weekday, and only make money from advertising.
- seabee 15y agoThe Metro is mostly recycled news stories and press releases from their sister paid-for newspaper, the Daily Mail; their costs are going to be a little less.
- mcobrien 15y agoTabloids traditionally make a higher percentage of income from the cover price compared to broadsheets, partly because their readers are less affluent and so less appealing to advertisers. Still, this 2002 article puts advertising at 40%, which sounds pretty important. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/13/advertising.circulationfigures http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/13/advertising.circ...
- anigbrowl 15y ago
- JonnieCache 15y agoInteresting to note that this was probably largely down to a concerted twitter campaign - egged on, as ever, by the gruaniad. See #notw over the last few days. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-world-twitter-campaign http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/news-of-...
- lclarkmichalek 15y agoYes, when I noticed that the guardian had a chart of the largest advertisers in the NOTW I did feel it was being a little silly. Though personally, that's why I like the guardian; when it's being biased, it's very obvious.
- willyt 15y agoAlso http://www.avaaz.org/en/ http://www.avaaz.org/en/ had a big part to play. That's how I found out about it, not from the Guardian.
- willyt 15y agoJust to add to this. I emailed the CEO of o2 last night to tell him that I would switch my business to another provider if they didn't pull their advertising and I received a reply within 15 mins (at about 9.00pm) saying they were already doing this and it said "sent from my iPad" so I kind of suspect that it was a personal email I received back. About 15 mins later o2 were being reported as having pulled their advertising following on from Ford, Mitsubishi, Virgin etc. By this morning most major companies had committed to pull their adverts. The whole thing happened in about 24 hours tops. Biggest selling Sunday paper to nothing. 'Name' journalists from other Murdoch brands, even the Times, are reporting being heckled in the street. A lot of people are very angry.
- speckledjim 15y agoGood example of mob rule vigilanteism rather than due process.
- willyt 15y agoA vigilante meets out extra legal punishment, nobody has been punished, it's just been pointed out by a lot of people that they need to be. Due process didn't work several times in this case because the Police were implicated and failed to investigate properly. Due process generally doesn't work when the system is infected at a high level and there are lots of careers being controlled by the source of the problem. The Prime Minister knew that his director of communications, who has now been arrested, was criminally implicated in this before he was elected a year ago and he was too scared of the tabloids to do anything about it. I think you need a public protest in these situations. Note: that Protest != Violence.
- eftpotrm 15y agoAnd yet people are leaving the Sun, sister paper in the empire and really quite similar, untouched. In fact some of the advertisers directly said they were swapping their advertising from NotW to the Sun. Tokenism on all fronts. NI will launch a Sunday version of the Sun within a few months with content suspiciously similar to NotW.
- seabee 15y agoI found it hard to tell the difference between content in the Sun and the News of the World on a good day. The loss is one of brand, little more.
- v21 15y agoTokenism indeed. I'm hoping similar fishy stories emerge from the Sun - but not that it'll close even if the exact same stuff happened there. To lose one red-top looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.