But last year was also marked by a deepening global recession, which was exacerbated, though only to a limited extent, by the September 11 atrocity. It has therefore been too readily assumed that the economic down-turn has been largely responsible for the fact that most national paper circulations fell, some to record lows.

Although that’s a perfectly logical assumption, and may well be “proved” to the satisfaction of optimists (aka owners and managers) by rises in sales when the economy bounces back, it ignores the fundamental reasons for the steepening sales decline, which is most evident among the highest-selling, mass-market sector and which, I am convinced, will not significantly improve in the post-recession period.

No-one can be absolutely certain why fewer people now buy or read papers than did some 40 years ago. There certainly isn’t a single reason, but it is my contention that a central factor – namely, the growing alienation of British people from the political process – has not been properly considered and may be more significant than has been realised. It is also deeply disturbing for those who support the democratic form of government because it’s my contention that news doesn’t matter any longer to most people in Britain (and, quite probably, to people in most western countries).

I have been writing about national newspaper sales figures virtually every month for the past nine years, charting both the short-term vicissitudes and the long-term trends. I have also made a close study of circulations going back to the 1930s. During that time there have been many factors affecting changes in buying habits, most obviously because of the rise of competing media such as radio, television and, latterly, the internet.

There have been demographic developments among the audience, with people becoming more affluent, better educated and both more socially and more geographically mobile. Similarly, the newspaper industry has been transformed in the last 50 years, most notably since the Wapping revolution in 1986. The growth of advertising and changes in production have enabled papers to expand enormously in size and to publish in colour. Competition has forced closures but new titles have taken their places and there are roughly the same number of titles available now as there were in 1945. (Incidentally, there are also roughly the same number of owners). Cover prices have risen, arguably above the level of inflation, though this effect has been offset by increased value for money, at least in terms of quantity.

Over the last half century there have been a number of recessions of varying severity but, until the one almost a decade ago, national paper sales appeared to be largely impervious to them. During the period of overall circulation growth, from the 1940s to the 1960s, it is impossible to trace much effect, even at the margins.

In the 1970s, the largest-selling popular titles of the previous era – the Daily Mirror and Daily Express – declined and the Daily Sketch closed. But The Sun rose and there was no detectable effect on its sales even during the imposition of three-day weeks in 1972 and 1974. The story changed little in 1980s either, with the newly-launched Daily Star and Today more than compensating for losses among the more established titles.

The broadsheet story was somewhat similar. The Daily Telegraph took off in the post-war period while The Guardian, Financial Times and The Times made more modest gains. Though the Telegraph went into decline from 1980 onwards the latter trio continued to improve, losing ground in 1987 following the launch of The Independent.

So only the slightest of sales variations could be attributed to the economic cycle over four decades. (I realise, of course, that recessions always hit newspaper advertising revenue, and none more so than this latest one, but that’s another story and is irrelevant to an analysis of circulation statistics).

It would appear, at first sight, that the recession of 1991 was different because circulations were affected. Indeed, the whole newspaper market – national, regional and local – suffered an unprecedented sales slump. For the national tabloids, the fall was nothing short of sensational. The Sun, riding high at 4 million throughout 1989 was struggling to hold on to 3.5 million by the middle of 1992.

In the same period, the Daily Mirror (which I edited from February 1990 to March 1991 and therefore experienced at first hand the initial effects of the collapse) fell from a buoyant 3.1 million to 2.8 million. The Daily Express, Daily Star, Daily Record and Today, all of which were on a downward path, suffered fewer losses, but they lost all the same. The Daily Mail had a nervous couple of months at the beginning of 1990, slipping to its lowest post-war sale, but recovered well afterwards.

To sum up, in the second half of 1989 those seven titles together sold 12,658,706 copies. By the second half of 1992, they sold 11,582,072, a loss of more than a million, an 8.5 per cent dive.

Losses

Why did the 1991 recession bite when previous downturns had not? My unhesitating view is that the recession must not be viewed as separate from the prevailing market trend: it amplified and accelerated the decline but it was not its cause.

Some buyers who needed to tighten their belts suddenly discovered that papers were no longer a marginal purchase because cover prices had increased above the level of inflation. But the fact that so many people felt able to give up buying a paper was significant in itself. They obviously conceived of newspaper-reading as an optional rather than a mandatory activity. It can now be seen that Rupert Murdoch’s response to that circulation crisis, which was both controversial and devastating, was only a temporary, if ruthlessly successful, stemming of the tide.

Having narrowly survived the meltdown of his global business, he dug into his newly-enriched corporate pockets – which were far deeper than those of his rivals – to cut the cover prices of The Times and The Sun. The result of his risk-taking initiative was an immediate reversal of fortunes for his titles as the circulations of both surged upwards while rivals suffered losses. The Independent, hit by financial problems and switches of ownership, found it impossible to sustain its competitive edge and, after a brief period when it was selling almost as many as The Times and The Guardian, gradually declined to about 220,000.

It was the victim of a price war in which Murdoch’s main target, the Daily Telegraph, also suffered. Its sales slipped below the million mark in the spring of 1994, forcing its owner to cut the price and then institute an expensive round of cheap rate subscriptions. Murdoch’s response was to cut The Times’s price still further, boosting its sale to more than 800,000 for a time.

His strategy also had a marked effect on the tabloid market. The Sun rapidly returned to its four million-plus sale while the Daily Mirror, unwilling to cut its price (and probably unable in its post-Maxwell era), declined still further. The Daily Star, Daily Record and Daily Express kept on shedding copies. Murdoch’s Today did better, inching up towards a sale of 600,000, but he found its financial losses insupportable and closed it in November 1995.

This closure was an immense boon to the Daily Mail. It had weathered the price war but seemed incapable of selling more than 1.8 million. Today’s demise enabled the Mail to take off. (On reflection, we can see Murdoch as a key player in the success of the Daily Mail: by trying to hire Associated’s most dynamic executive, Paul Dacre, he forced a change of editorship and soon closed Today, thus gifting Dacre 250,000 extra buyers).

But the price war – like the recession – has cloaked the underlying sales trend, concealing from almost every commentator the real situation. For the past 30-odd years popular, or down market, papers have been losing their popularity while the broadsheets have secured modest increases in readerships. The middle market, in spite of the Daily Mail’s signal success, has expanded only slightly.

In November 2001, the six tabloids (Sun, Mail, Mirror, Express, Star and Record) jointly sold 10,196,303 copies, a decrease of 19.5 per cent in 12 years. Over the same period, the five broadsheets (Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times) sold 2,853,569, a rise of 7.21per cent. The decline of the Sunday tabloid market, which has lost 29.5 per cent, is even more marked. Again, the Sunday broadsheets have risen, by 16.5 per cent, though the volume gains fall far short of the losses.

I am not playing with statistics. Indeed, I am being uncharacteristically generous by overlooking the fact that most current circulations are boosted by the addition of bulk sales that were unknown a dozen years ago. The undeniable truth is that tabloid newspapers have lost a significant proportion of their audience and are now losing them at a faster rate than any previous period in their history.

Mass circulation papers, as they were once known, hardly merit that description any longer. By the end of 2001, The Mirror was at its lowest sales point since 1946, The Sun at its lowest since 1974 and the Express at its lowest since the early 1920s. The Star, which has undoubtedly attracted some readers from these titles in the past two years, is but a pipsqueak in reality. Despite its recent success, it is still selling half of what it did at its height.

The Record, once the seemingly impregnable bible of the Scottish working class, has been humbled. It has suffered partly because of its own erratic performance, but mainly because its territory has been invaded by London-based titles, such as the Sun and the Mail, which have been forced to cast further afield in order to find readers.

Television

There have been many factors in the gradual erosion of newspaper-buying: people who drive to work are less likely to read a paper; some newsagents will no longer deliver to homes in inner city areas; Sunday readership has declined more quickly because people are enjoying leisure pursuits outside their homes. The tradition of people reading more than one title has become atypical.

The offspring of tabloid-reading parents, especially the increasing numbers benefiting from tertiary education, are less likely to buy a red-top. A small number of them have graduated to the broadsheets. Others have preferred to take the Daily Mail and its Sunday stablemate. This group are also likely to be the most regular users of the internet.

Many thousands of people, most of them young, are also unlikely to buy a paper when they can obtain one for nothing. In the main cities some 800,000 copies of Metro are distributed free every morning to commuters, making it the nation’s sixth largest daily. It is anodyne stuff, but it does cover the domestic news diary.

Educating people to believe they shouldn’t have to pay for their daily paper is a worrying trend. It convinces the public that there is no cost to gathering and disseminating news, and it makes the press far too reliant on advertising revenue.

None of what I have said so far is particularly new. After a period of denial, the owners and editors of red-tops have come to realise in the past five years that their audience has changed. The majority of Britons are now categorised as middle or upper class rather than working class, a key factor in the growth of the Mail titles which has played well to social climbers.

Red-tops belatedly attempted to alter their approach, with both The Mirror and The Sun unsuccessfully trying to adopt a more Mail-like approach to their editorial content. Worried by losing their older, core readership, their incongruous attempts to ape the Mail have often been risible. Neither have found a consistent voice.

But the interpretation of Britain as a better educated, more middle class society which is seeking a more literate, slightly less hysterical press is far too mechanistic. It misses the point by a mile. The reality is that many newly-affluent people are uninterested in news. They are totally indifferent to the news agenda itself because it largely revolves around the political process.

They have found that they can live out their lives without the need to know about, let alone be involved in, political affairs. Nor are they thirsting for information about the wider world. The market is king, money is the nexus, and people are therefore content to be consumers. They have become comfortable in an environment where, ostensibly, everything is just fine.

The great clashes of the last century – two world wars and the cold war fought between capitalism and communism – are over. On the domestic front, the major battle between capital and labour, between the bosses and unions, appears to have been resolved. The main political parties have moved so far towards the centre there is little to discern in ideological terms between the two. Ideology? Who cares?

Labour’s acceptance of the prevailing economic system and its ability to sell itself as the most efficient and compassionate manager of the market has, at least for the foreseeable future, suffocated effective opposition. Anyway, what’s the point of opposition? No wonder the Tory party has been unable to raise funds.

Even unemployment isn’t an issue. People continue to be concerned about the health service, education and the state of transport, but these are old sores, rubbed down the years, seemingly intractable, apparently without solution. They are just part of the fabric of British life. They are not subjects that move people to demonstrate as they did against the nuclear bomb or the Vietnam war.

To many people, probably the vast majority, politics has become irrelevant. By extension therefore, so have newspapers. Knowing what Gordon Brown thinks of Tony Blair – a Westminster obsession and therefore a recurring newspaper preoccupation – is seen as utterly irrelevant. Arcane disputes between personalities within Westminster’s beltway are rightly viewed with disdain by the public.

Reality

Paradoxically, although many more people now travel abroad than 50 years ago, they are far less interested in foreign affairs than the previous generations. Their only concern is whether the country they choose for their holidays is safe and cheap.

It could be argued that people are less informed because their papers have gradually given up reporting from abroad. Then again, editors would counter that foreign news has long been the least-read component of their papers. It’s true that international stories regularly appeared on the front pages of popular papers in the 1950s, but most had some kind of British link because they were about the disintegration of empire. In those days Britain viewed itself as a major world power, and it’s clear that during the lengthy course of coming to terms with our nation’s less exalted status that people have become increasingly indifferent to foreign affairs.

It may be an uncomfortable truth, but the British people have discovered that they can live out their lives perfectly well without the need to know anything about anything from anywhere. They are content to pick up the scanty information provided by a half-heard three-minute radio bulletin. If it’s a serious matter they might watch the start of television news. If it’s really serious – such as the September 11 outrage – then they show that they are prepared to buy a paper, but only for a day or so.

Once the huge outpouring of concern about the twin towers evaporated sales fell rapidly in the three months afterwards. Even the fact that British troops risked their lives in a controversial campaign in Afghanistan engendered little interest. As long as their own lives are not threatened, then what’s the point of news, except as a rather depressing backdrop to their otherwise reasonably contented lives?

The detachment from politics has been illustrated in every recent election, whether local, parliamentary or European. The June 2001 general election turnout of 59 per cent was the worst since universal suffrage was introduced and, most notably, followed a campaign in which editors found it extremely difficult to sell their papers. The link is obvious: the rejection of politics goes hand in hand with the rejection of newspapers.

In so many ways, political apathy among what we might term the emergent middle class is a mirror of the traditional disinterest, and often disgust, for politics among the lower working class who have long been the least regular readers of papers and have proved exceedingly hard to attract in recent years.

This situation isn’t really a surprise to me. My generation, the so-called baby boomers, were born immediately after the second world war and have enjoyed the fruits of 55 years of peace with increasing affluence. More than a quarter of a century ago I wrote a study of 122 contemporaries at my working class grammar school which suggested, somewhat controversially, that we were in danger of becoming what I termed a “domesticated class”.¹ It was a tentative theory, wrapped inside a wildly overstated polemic, in which I sought to show that my generation had “taken the narrow path to apathy and complacency.” They had become “passive consumers... the quintessence of quiescence... suspended in limbo, a class void...” Despite the hyperbole, I still think there is a great deal of truth in that thesis of alienation, arguably magnified by the offspring of my generation.

But it would be remiss of me not to look at the problem from the other direction: are newspapers to blame for the decline in their audience? Have they instilled, or contributed to, the culture of apathy? Have they adopted misguided news agendas? Have they failed to present news in a stimulating way? Have they redefined themselves into purveyors of entertainment rather than information? Have they become hostages to commerce, thus failing to provide the proper resources to publish proper news? Have they turned from afflicting the comfortable to comforting the afflicted?

These are all relevant questions, but they cannot be separated from the cultural developments among the public. Papers tend to lead blindly and then follow with their eyes wide open. They are slower to change than other media, such as television, but once they understand the direction their audience is taking, or has already taken, they readily accept the need to alter that editorial approach. This is partly a commercial necessity, of course: a paper cannot afford to divorce itself from its readers by adopting an agenda too few people desire (a fact The Independent failed to appreciate for too long).

In response to declining circulations, all papers of whatever shape and size have tried to stop the rot by trying to appeal to a wider audience, usually through celebrity-style material. It would appear that the greatest beneficiaries of this transformation have been the broadsheets rather than the tabloids, because the former can provide a more rounded and comprehensive package, incorporating both the serious and the light, retaining the editorial credibility and authority which the tabloids long ago sacrificed. That’s why, although the future for all newspapers may be bleak, it is far brighter for the broadsheets.

¹ Roy Greenslade, Goodbye To The Working Class (Marion Boyars, 1976).