The slow decline of newspapers and television (or why Singapore sports fans see little relevance in local media)

The slow decline of newspapers and television (or why Singapore sports fans see little relevance in local media)

Oct. 30, 2008 - By Les Tan

Managers who need to figure out where to spend their limited sports marketing dollars would not have missed the war of words between The Straits Times and MediaCorp this week about their respective readership and viewership figures.

What started it all?

The Straits Times published a full-page advertisement* highlighting itself and three other papers (My Paper, Shin Min, The Business Times) for having an increased reach year-on-year. It cites as source the 2008 Nielsen Media Index survey**. (The New Paper (TNP) is absent from this ad because its readership has fallen since last year.) The same advertisement points out that the reach of free-to-air television channels (Channel 5, U, 8, CNA) has fallen anywhere from 1.9% for CNA to 3% for Channel U.

MediaCorp sent a letter to the Straits Times forum (Wednesday, October 29, 2008, page A23) in reply. While they did not dispute the reach numbers, the Deputy CEO of MediaCorp stated that the absolute numbers of viewers for their channels have gone up, quoting viewership statistics from Taylor Nelson Sofries (TNS). TNS uses the people meter system, measuring television sets electronically across a sample of households on a minute-by-minute basis.

So who is correct? Both are, but only because they are looking at different measurements. While MediaCorp is focusing on absolute numbers, the Straits Times is focusing on reach. While everyone understands absolute numbers, “reach” is advertising industry jargon.

Reach is defined as the size of the audience who listen to, read, view or otherwise access a particular work in a given period. So when the Straits Times says in its headline that “1.44 million read ST”, it doesn’t mean the researchers met 1.44 million people who read the Straits Times. The Nielsen Media Index survey only interviewed 4,700 respondents aged 15 years and up. The 1.44 million figure is therefore only an extrapolation, an educated guess.

The more relevant statistic is “circulation”, the number of newspapers distributed everyday. The circulation figures of English newspapers are showing a long-term decline. In a separate set of figures provided online by the Department of Statistics, circulation of English newspapers dropped 24.5% from 2002 to 2007. Looking at the Audit Bureau of Circulations and numbers culled from littlespeck.com, the circulation of the Straits Times in particular has dropped 3.5% from 1998 to 2007 (see graphic below).

The circulation number is far more illuminating because it is a better indicator of true behaviour. If you pay for your newspaper, you are actually going to read it.

Reader surveys on the other hand, have an inherent flaw by their very nature. Folks always tend to ‘upgrade’ their answer to avoid looking like an uneducated fool. A Maxim magazine reader may not admit to reading the title and tick “The Economist” magazine instead, for example. If you don’t read papers at all, you may indicate otherwise just to come across a little more educated to yourself or the surveyor. So the fact that the Nielsen Media Index survey indicated that the Straits Times has 105,000 more readers this year than last must be taken in that light.

As for television, their lower reach numbers this year simply indicated that as a percentage of the population, fewer households are watching free-to-air telvision channels. So while their absolute numbers can go up, as a percentage of the population, television viewing is down, and so the Straits Times advertisement in correct. The declining reach shows a decline in relevance, regardless of the absolute numbers.

What has this all to do with Singapore sports?

If you are an advertiser or public relations executive leveraging on your sports sponsorship, it is relevant because you have to find an emotional connection with your Singapore audience. The problem now is to find them. Reaching them through the traditional media like the local newspapers and free-to-air television channels has yielded declining results over the years. An emotional connection is hard to make, especially if the medium concerned has had less relevance to the sports consumer over the years.

Perhaps the local English newspapers have seen the long slow decline in circulation over the years because of just this lack of relevance. The sports sections of English newspapers focus primarily on the international sports scene. The New Paper is essentially a newspaper dedicated to the English Premier League, so its drop in readership may be even more alarming for Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) Limited which owns the paper. If you can’t keep your readership with coverage of what is supposedly the most entertaining football league in the world, then the future looks bleak.

The newspapers can provide so much international coverage because of the globalisation of news. They depend on the news agencies (Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse) for all the sports stories that you read (you can see the relevant agency quoted at the end of each story in the papers). The problem with this approach is that whatever you read in the sports section is already online the night before.

Furthermore, this service does not come cheap. There is no way to ascertain how much SPH pays because the figure is not in the public domain but the experience of newspapers in the United States may be indicative.

An editor of a US newspaper was quoted by the New York Times as saying that her paper pays over US$1 million in fees per year to the Associated Press (AP). The way the rates are structured, newspapers outside of the US are charged more for the service.

Since SPH would have bargaining power with their huge stable of newspapers, a conservative estimate of the fees they pay to AP and the other agencies would amount to S$2 million per agency per year, or S$6 million in total per year. Just S$1 million would pay for 20 extra reporters to cover the local sports scene.

As a result of this focus on international sports, the local newspapers do not provide a continuing story about Singapore sports, the S.League coverage being a case in point. The S.League is Singapore’s only professional sports league yet receives little or no continuous coverage in the Straits Times or the New Paper. The coverage in Today is paid for and so should be seen as advertorial rather than editorial coverage.

Newspapers are seeing a general trend globally of declining circulation. The Christian Science Monitor, a 100-year-old national newspaper in the United States, has abandoned its daily print newspaper and will appear online only and will sell a weekly magazine hard copy to subscribers. The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was asked if the well-known paper would still remain a print product in 10 years. He said: “The heart of the answer must be (that) we can’t care,” Sulzberger added that he expects print to be around for a long time but “we must be where people want us for our information.”

Given our unique environment where the newspaper industry is seen as a pivotal element in Singapore’s political stability, few expect the Straits Times to get ravaged so badly by market forces as to become a dinosaur and fail. There is no competing alternative to the Straits Times in this market to inflict that kind of mortal wound to its reputation and circulation.

As for television, since the collapse of Sportscity at the end of 2001, the sports-only channel that MediaCorp had on air for only two short years, there has been no serious sports programming to speak of on free-to-air television. Television plays an even smaller role in the local sports scene when compared to the newspapers, limiting itself only to the odd news story or documentary about sports. There is no weekly sports programme that covers the Singapore sports scene comprehensively. Sports television is now dominated by cable, with its focus on international sports events, particularly the English Premier League football.

So the Singapore sports story, which once dominated the imagination of an earlier generation with sports heroes like C. Kunalan, Quah Kim Song and Chee Swee Lee – athletes that could strut confidently on the South-east Asian and Asian scene – is now a frail sapling living in the shadow of a foreign implant. The decline is inversely proportional to the increased coverage of international sports.

Singapore newspaper circulation figures

The circulation of local English newspapers is down while Chinese newspapers show an uptrend. (graphic © Les Tan/Red Sports)

*Source: The Straits Times, Tuesday, October 21, 2008, page B8 (The ad quotes as its source the Nielsen Media Index 2008)

The Straits Times: +1.9%
My Paper: +1.2%
Shin Min: +0.9%
The Business Times: +0.5%

Channel 5: -1.5%
Channel U: -3%
Channel8: -2.1%
CNA: -1.9%

**At this point, I am still unable to find a full copy of the 2008 Nielsen Media Index survey and so it’s not possible to provide a third-party view of all the competing claims. My guess is that the report is only available in full to those who pay for it.