On Monday this week, the latest audience figures for online and print news media were released. Nearly all the news services reported them, but the facts were spun so hard it was difficult to believe they were dealing with the same data.
Anyone who compared the reporting was likely to have concluded that somebody was telling lies
For example, News Corporation’s The Herald Sun claimed the figures showed it was the best read outlet in the state of Victoria, with a total monthly audience of 2.976 million.
The Herald Sun claimed that its rival, The Age, was in trouble. “Saturday Age’s audience crashed 12 per cent to 345,000, the Sunday Age tumbled 10 per cent to 234,000 readers, and the weekday Age slumped 4.1 per cent to 397,000,” claimed the Herald Sun.
But if you read The Age’s report of the same figures you would have gotten a vastly different impression. The Age claimed it was “the most popular Melbourne masthead” with 5.39 million readers – the best since the current method of measuring readership began.
Meanwhile the Murdoch flagship The Australian claimed it was “enjoying an extraordinary surge in audience, with more than 4.5 million people now reading the national daily” making it “the number 1 subscriber-only digital news site in the country”. It claimed the Sydney Morning Herald was suffering readership declines.
And yet the Sydney Morning Herald claimed it had the biggest audience in the country “of the sites measured in the … survey” (with this being an important qualification, as we shall see).
It’s enough to do your head in, and certainly not designed to increase confidence in the ability of the mainstream media to report independently, clearly, and accurately.
Yet nobody is lying. All these outlets are telling a selective truth. It’s a great example of spin.
I’ll try to unpick the stats, but first some background.
Readership figures are not only about journalists’ egos and political influence. They are used to convince advertisers they should pay for space in particular media outlets. To be able to claim that you are the best-read paper in a state translates directly into revenue.
But there is no perfect way of measuring the audience of a media outlet, and the various systems that have existed have all been controversial.
In the old, pre-digital days newspaper organisations measured circulation, and readership was calculated on a formula that assumed each hard copy had a certain number of readers.
Newsagents returned unsold copies and these were in theory deducted from the totals – although there were regular reports of this system being fiddled.
It got more complicated when newspapers started giving away copies – for example at airports and hotels – to beef up circulation figures. Various “fixes” were introduced in which so long as buyer paid something for a title – no matter how little – a portion of the discounted circulation could be included.
This led to deals being done with the AFL, for example, in which a ticket to the game included a copy of the newspaper. The copy was not “free” and therefore could be counted as circulation. Whether or not it was read is another matter.
The advent of digital publication complicated all this, and for years the measurements of digital readership were all pretty dubious.
Could someone be said to have “read” a paper if they came to it via a search engine, and instantly bounced away?
Then there was the issue of web-site refresh rates, and whether someone who left a window open on their browser while doing other things would be counted as having visited the site many times through the day, even if they never looked at it.
Some years ago now these issues lead to the publishers agreeing on an industry standard approach – Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) – which uses a combination of detailed surveys by Ipsos with Nielsen’ Digital news measurement system to give figures for the total readership of news media across print and digital.
Subscribers to the service get a lot more information – including demographics and spending habits of the audiences - but the publicly released information can be read here.
Also important are the Nielsen figures for digital readership – which include digital only news sites such as The Guardian Australia and the ABC. The Nielsen data, which was released at the same time as the EMMAs, can be read here.
So, how do the rival media outlets manage to spin such different yarns out of the same data?
Faced with a crisis-laden year, Australians have turned to mainstream media, and almost all outlets benefited with big lifts compared to the previous year. This peaked in June-July, meaning that most outlets have suffered drops since then – but are still by and large ahead over the year.
So let’s unpick the competing claims between the Age and the Herald Sun.
The EMMA total audience report for September 2020 shows that the Herald Sun has 4.28 million readers for the month. This includes just over 2 million readers of the print edition, and 2.99 million online. (Keep in mind that some people read BOTH the online and print versions, which means the total audience figure is lower than the sum of the two platforms).
The Age, on the other hand, has a total audience figure of 5.39 million – just over 1 million in print, and 4.87 million online.
| Title | Print Audience – Sep 2020 (millions) | Digital Audience – Sep 2020 (millions) | Total Audience – Sep 2020 (millions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herald Sun | 2,071 | 2,996 | 4,283 |
| The Age | 1,046 | 4,872 | 5,387 |
Take these figures in isolation, and you’d conclude The Age is justified in saying it is the most popular masthead in Victoria. This would be a big turn-around of considerable political significance. In the days of print, the Herald Sun used to outsell The Age by many, many copies. The digital age has changed this picture, with the rivals to Murdoch’s media empire successfully picking up more readers online.
But not so fast. This is not the whole story.
News Corporation’s head of communications, Mathew Charles, responded to my queries about this by saying that when you look at READERS LIVING IN VICTORIA (a figure not publicly released by EMMA) the Herald Sun had 2.976 million readers, whereas The Age had a Victorian resident audience of 2.829 million.
These figures mean that many readers of both media outlets are outside the state, but the Herald Sun still squeaks it in as the best-read outlet among readers residing in Victoria.
News Corporation will be less keen to point out, though, that while both outlets have increased their readership over the last year, The Age has had a much bigger increase – mostly driven by digital readers.
| Title | Total Readership September 2019 (millions) | Total Readership September 2020 (millions) | Percentage increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herald Sun | 4,207 | 4,283 | 1.81% |
| The Age | 4,344 | 5,387 | 24% |
So how can the Herald Sun claim that The Age is going backwards? Well, here is where the spin has gone into overdrive.
As you will see from the first table, a higher proportion of Herald Sun readers access the print newspaper, whereas The Age is doing best online.
When the Herald Sun reported that the audience for the Saturday and Sunday Age had “crashed” while the Herald Sun had “jumped” it had moved seamlessly (and without making it clear) from talking about total audience to talking about only the print products. And yes, if we talk about only dead tree versions of the paper, the figures are correct - just very selectively reported.
Charles also made the point that the Nine newspapers (The Age and Sydney Morning Herald) allow readers to access some of their stories for free, whereas the Herald Sun demands a subscription to read almost all its content.
True, but on the other hand the Herald Sun has been giving away free copies of its paper all year – for example to those who spend $20 or more at IGA supermarkets, I suspect it is these giveaways that partly explain its healthier print product figures.
So what about the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian? Here the reporting in The Australian was spun to within an inch of its life.
The EMMA figures show The Australian’s total audience is just 4.56 million for the month, whereas the Sydney Morning Herald was a whopping 9.24 million.
The only way The Australian can justify its claim to be the number one news site in the country is by using those weasel words “subscriber only”. This, presumably, is a reference to the fact that the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age allow readers to access a limited number of stories for free, whereas if you want to read The Australian you have to pay.
Meanwhile the claims that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are dropping readers is once again a shifty move from talking about total audience to audiences for only the print products.
But the Sydney Morning Herald also employs spin when it claims to have the biggest audience “of the sites measured in the EMMA survey”. That is a reference to the fact that the EMMA figures don’t include online only sites – such as news.com.au.
Still with me?
The table below is drawn from Nielsen, and shows the top ten news media websites in the country. Here we can see why the Sydney Morning Herald prefers to confine its commentary to the EMMA figures which exclude digital only outlets – because news.com.au is miles ahead of the Sydney Morning Herald.
The dominance of news.com.au is probably also the reason that the News Corporation individual mastheads – such as the Herald Sun – are relatively weak with their online figures. News.com.au cannibalises them by drawing on stories from across the organisation. It is also free to view. We can safely assume the Herald Sun would be doing better online if news.com.au didn’t exist.
Top 10 current events and global news - tagged September 2020
| Rank | Name | Unique Audience | MoM% UA Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ABC News Websites | 12,029,404 | -7.4% |
| 2 | news.com.au | 11,296,179 | 0.4% |
| 3 | Daily Mail Australia | 10,669,891 | -1.8% |
| 4 | 7NEWS | 9,562,308 | -3.4% |
| 5 | nine.com.au | 9,402,720 | -8.8% |
| 6 | smh.com.au | 8,960,263 | -3.9% |
| 7 | The Guardian | 6,223,716 | -16.0% |
| 8 | The Age | 4,892,426 | -20.8% |
| 9 | Australian Community Media Network | 4,030,281 | -1.6% |
| 10 | Yahoo! | 3,485,894 | 7.3% |
Some will have been wondering about the position of newer, online-only outlets, such as The Guardian. The Nielsen figures show it is the seventh top online news source in Australia, with 6.2 million readers – ranking between the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – which of course share many of their stories. Rather good for a relative newcomer. (The Guardian is free to view).
As for other newcomers, such as The Saturday Paper, its readership is too small to register in most of the figures reported on Monday, but last June it was recorded as having a total readership of 589,000. Of this, 462,000 read it in print, and 134,000 accessed the website.
The low figures don’t tell the whole story. The Saturday Paper has a unique strength in that almost all of this readership is made up of subscribers – people who have committed to the paper, rather than just picking it up as a freebie or stumbling across it online. That meant The Saturday Paper was better placed than some of its competitors when advertising disappeared during the Covid crisis.
(By the way, if you are wondering why most outlets show a drop month to month in the above table, it’s because of the surge in readership of almost all outlets during the peak of the Covid crisis. That surge is now dissipating).
Finally, all the commercial outlets leave out one significant factor. They are all well behind the ABC’s news websites, which are the most read in the country. Various surveys also show that the ABC is the nation’s most trusted news provider.
How to sum up this story?
First, don’t trust news outlets to do a good job of reporting their own affairs.
Second, the most widely read News Corporation outlet, by a considerable margin, is news.com.au. How well it is read, and whether it is trusted, is not a question that can be answered by these figures.
Third, the most important competitor to News Corporation is the ABC. Which, leaving ideology aside, is part of the explanation for the continuous hostility between the two organisations.
And finally, none of these figures tell you anything about news media revenue. I can tell you that it is through the floor for almost all commercial outlets, which is why we have fewer journalists. If you are wondering about the quality of news coverage, that is the main thing to worry about.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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