Newspaper funding in the age of the internet.

How are newspapers funded? When you buy a paper, you spend money purchasing the product. But what happens when people are reading the same stories for free via the internet? Why would people still pay for the product at all?

Since the internet has eroded traditional funding streams, it is vital that newspapers continue making enough profit to pay journalists and editors to generate the news product.

Task: How much does each newspaper cost? Research the cover price of the following newspapers. What do you notice about the prices and which newspapers cost the most or the least? Why do you think this is?

1. The Times
2. The Sun
3. The Daily Mail
4. The Guardian
5. The Telegraph
6. The Mirror

Circulation and readership

A major source of income is via advertisers who pay to market their own products in newspapers. Companies know it is a major part of a marketing campaign to advertise their product in a newspaper with a large readership because plenty of potential customers will see their advertisement. As a result, advertisers pay news organisations substantial costs to buy space in their publication, and how much they pay depends on how many readers they expect to buy the newspaper.

A newspaper's circulation is the number of copies that are distributed to newsagents and news stands on an average day. These numbers are recorded by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).

The ABC's membership comes from various media organisations, traders, advertisers and agencies that provide statistics to calculate research data.

The National Readership Survey (NRS) provides audience research to newspapers and potential advertisers on estimated readership numbers, which can often be quite different from circulation figures.

A newspaper's readership is the newspaper's total circulation multiplied by the average number of people who read each copy. For example, various family members may read the same copy of a newspaper. This 'pass-along' rate is generally thought to be about 2.5 readers per publication. This relationship between readership and circulation is known as readers-per-copy.

Task: Click on the logo above to find out the ABC figures for each of the national and regional newspapers. Create a table in your book detailing the ABC figure for each newspaper's print edition and online product.

1. The Times
2. The Sun
3. The Daily Mail
4. The Guardian
5. The Telegraph
6. The Mirror
7. The Leicester Mercury

Online news

All major UK newspapers have web editions which can sometimes include more content than the printed paper. Newspapers may offer a lot of this content for free, a number place some or all of their content behind a paywall, which means readers must pay to access it. Being able to link to existing web pages allows readers access to additional content which includes archived material. 

Online newspapers enjoy a crucial advantage over print versions in that they can be updated in real-time with breaking news. This has made online newspapers more like broadcast media channels that can transmit 24 hours a day. 

In 2005, 13 million newspapers were sold daily; by 2015, this figure fell to 7 million. The availability of newspapers online is partly responsible for this decline but the popularity of blogs, vlogs and other online content areas have made an impact too. The Independent newspaper moved to an online only publication in 2016.

Homework Task: Look at the online news products offered by the different newspapers.