mediapie

Prices go up, demand goes down. Introduction to Economics, Page 3...

2007-01-16T13:43:00.000Z

The Sunday Times is nursing a price-rise hangover of around 10% of it's readership. This is after it raised it's prices by a 1/9 . That's a pretty even trade-off. For the money men, the numbers show, well, something. In December 2005, the paper cost £1.60 ( the first price rise occurred in February, up from £1.60 to £1.80.) Circulation was around 1,300,000. (Rounded for meagre brain-maths.)

Money from circulation... 1300000 * 1.6 = £2080000

Last December's circulation was taken at £2 per copy. 1200000 * 2 = £2400000

The change in cover price profit is £320,000.
That's a middle-of-the-road townhouse for John Witherow, no?

Big sale numbers bring in the advertisers, yet the Sunday Times readership remains around equal to the sum of the rest of the quality sundays.

There is still no competition for audience penetration of a certain reader type that you simply won't get with the News Of The World.

Telegraph tells bloggers how to do it

2007-01-15T09:00:00.000Z

The Telegraph's varied crew of bloggers have been told to limit the amount of 'insider knowledge' they put into their posts.

This seems to be in response to their American editor's post about Hussein's hanging, which mystically appeared before it had even taken place.

Toby Harnden gave a broad description of what the execution was going to be like, but was caught out by various undetails. Like wearing a hood, which he didn't.

Shane Richmond sent out a message asking its writers to avoid blogging about the DailyTel. This is an odd one, as most of their bloggers' best stuff come from their posts about their job.
If they have to distance themselves from mentioning the paper, where is the openess we've been looking for as bloggers? A simple post below explaining it as a preview report would've avoided most of the panic.
You can see a heavily edited version here.

The article's now been massaged into the main sight, away from angry bloggers and their associated.

Big Bad Papers #2: The Independent

2007-01-12T17:28:00.000Z

Wordblog's been keeping a very careful eye on the Independent's blog collection. Not that he's needed to. There's been just a single post since New Year, but also a meagre three categories; Photography (three posts), Environment (a massive two posts), and Comedy (four posts) .

Cameras, green and comedy. Two of those sum up the Indie's attempts at blogging, and it's got nowt to do with flash.

Putting-the-mental-into-environmental aside... they're not exactly Indie's biggest topics of interest.Where's all the Bush-bashing banter I've grown to expect from the Bizarro World's Daily Mail?

Funnily, if you check Technorati, you'll see that half of the links, all nine, complain about the rubbishness of the damn thing.

Big Bad Papers #1: The Times

2007-01-11T20:57:00.000Z

A favourite graduate recruitment in-bag freebie, The Times is desperate for readers.

That's why they're getting an expense hernia expanding into Scotland, and it's why they pepper universities with discount vouchers, even though most unions sell the paper for 25p already...

Confusingly their student website suffers from sections running over each others topics. News then Talking Points? Jobs, then a specialised Student Law section- because it's not actually about legal rights for young adults not really in the know, but a cunning way to get solictor and law school advertising onsite.

Worse, most of the content is contracted out to the students themselves. There's the occassional original gem, but they're mostly drawing insipid writing from wannabe journos, at the best most often price for website pages; free.

And, if you pay peanuts you're going to get some right turkeys. Or something.
There's quote nabbing from here and here, but! Courtesy of the comments, one of them's a misquote.

Welcome...

2006-09-17T06:51:00.000Z

To MediaPie. Please come back once we're up and running.

Fangs,
MP