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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Full magazine ABCs coverage | How Prince Andrew arrest story broke
And a senior former policeman casts doubt over key Prince Harry privacy case source
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 23 February.
📉 The latest UK magazine ABC results show that it is hard but not impossible to grow print sales.
Harper’s Bazaar, The Week Junior, Homes & Gardens and Elle were among just ten out of 131 ABC audited titles to grow paid-for print circulation year on year. We have a full breakdown of print magazine sales figures here (with year-on-year change).
Another strong performer was The Spectator which recorded the biggest paid-for sale in its 198-year-history. We found out how the Paul Marshall-owned title did it and took a closer look at other news and current affairs titles (including Private Eye, slightly down but vastly outperforming national newspaper titles).
There are steep falls among popular weekly titles, with Reach-owned celeb mags New! And OK! falling 31% and 27% respectively. Monthly titles like Prima, Grazia and Elle were far more resilient. We have full analysis of the women’s interest magazines sector here.
And we have tracked the performance of digital magazines (online replicas of the print edition). These sales provide a slightly artificial boost to overall magazine circulations because many publishers count those who get print and digital copies as part of the same subscription as two sales.
We’ve also broken out all you can read sales, which account for most of the growth in digital editions. Apple News+ is the biggest player in this sector and shares a pretty stingy 50% of £12.99 per month with publishers who are part of its Spotify-style market.
These bundled subscriptions provide useful additional revenue for publishers, but all you can read subs are worth a fraction of direct sales. Again, these are rather misleadingly boosting headline ABC totals.
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📸 I’ve take a closer look at how the Andrew arrest story broke on Thursday and salute two photographers and the BBC’s Lucy Manning for getting the story out.
There is a pretty strong legal presumption of anonymity before charge for those under criminal investigation in the UK. But we’ve also found out why publishers took the risk of naming Mountbatten-Windsor before the King issued his statement on the arrest.
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The claimants’ case appears to rest almost entirely on testimony from dodgy private investigators who were paid for their views.
Former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met Police David Wood has now severely undermined evidence from a former police informant who said he overheard a private investigator boast of illegally targeting Doreen Lawrence for the Daily Mail.
🪦And Guardian chief reporter Daniel Boffey has done his father Chris proud with this obituary.
Boffey senior had a rare combination of journalistic skills: a star reporter and newsdesk supremo who was as at home at the News of the World as he was at The Observer.
What a life and what a man. Crossheads include: “Smuggled criminal Ronnie Knight into the UK” and “Naked except for a gas mask covering Gulf War for News of the World”.