Old new or borrowed they can give you the blues
Old, new or borrowed, they can give you the blues.From September I’ll be in Toronto editing Canada’s most important national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, a paper that has been going for a century and a half and still believes enough in keeping people seriously informed to have foreign bureaux all over the world. But the age of contentment, of a people-carrier in the garage and a sprinkler on the lawn, breeds its own sicknesses. Ramsay MacDonald had just formed a national government and boasted that his reward would be a kiss from every duchess in London.England in 1999 is different Politics is abolished; the economy is benign Duchesses are not what they were. “What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?” Auden’s question of 1932 was sentimental, too, and shadowed by another war.
Fascism loomed, and the economy had collapsed. Sentimental, of course, but perhaps none the worse for that. The three divisions of the Canadian Corps were heroic in the Great War and reading the accounts, as I did this weekend, of the capture of Courcelette, the dashing assault on Vimy, the exhausting struggle for Hill 70 and the ferocious breakthrough at Amiens, I come to love the Canadians and everything about them.
Like vichyssoise it may be – cold, half-French and hard to stir (as someone nearly said) – but I’m looking forward to Canada. The reason lies in the success of its Star Wars magazine in the spring.The Force is no longer with them. The Sunday Times’ circulation in April was 1,402,210, and in May it was 1,397,596 And last month it went down to 1,339,930.. But to have well over 50 per cent at less than the cover price is excessive by any standards.A 4.1 per cent drop month for The Sunday Times seems surprisingly large. It sold 348,000 at the proper cover price – the remainder of the 822,414 circulation being either give-aways, discounted or subscription copies.There is not a single national newspaper that does not have a proportion of discounted copies. The Observer has increased its export and discounted copies by 5,000.The Sunday Telegraph, up by 1 per cent, did well from the Royal Wedding But the satisfaction that it can take is limited. Like its sister daily paper, The Sunday Telegraph’s full-rate figure was poor.
A 0.61 per cent decline from May to June has taken its circulation of 1,094,661 perilously near to under the important one million mark.In the Sunday broadsheet market, The Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday both had a poor June, while The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer recorded small increases.The Independent on Sunday suffered a decline of 2.3 per cent in June. The 1,041,008- selling paper actually sold 645,088 at full rate and gave away 49,507 free. The rest were discount and subscription copies.While the Telegraph boasted on its front page last Saturday that its lead over The Times had risen again, and it was now 322,177 copies ahead, in full rate sales The Telegraph is only around 48,000 copies ahead of The Times.The Independent was the only broadsheet to increase its month-on-month and year-on-year circulation last month – barring the specialist readership Financial Times which is not included in the ABC’s (Audit Bureau of Circulation’s) official broadsheet breakdowns, but which nevertheless continues its impressive progress.The Guardian suffered a fall of 1.5 per cent on May – which was to its lowest figure since December 98.Express editor Rosie Boycott will not be greeted by any good news when she returns from her honeymoon. Like colleagues on The Independent and on The Guardian, they will have to write a daily review, or pull-out, front.Stothard’s move to highlight his arts and features coverage is interesting, for it is basically saying that readers, of arts pages in particular, can still be put off by a section with a business lead and be unwilling to turn a few pages to find the items that interest them.It is a cynical view, but I suspect an accurate one.Elsewhere, The Daily Telegraph recorded its lowest full-rate sale since the present method of collating circulation figures began.