Only Sun and Daily Star escape readership declines across nationals

Only the Sun and the Daily Star escaped significant readership declines across the UK national press in 2010, according to the National Readership Survey.

The Sun remained the UK's most popular national title with an estimated readership of 7.72 million, a very slight decline of 0.5 per cent on the previous year. Estimated readership for the Star stayed put at 1.57 million.

The Independent led declines across the rest of the UK's national newspapers, suffering a 21 per cent year-on-year drop, according to the survey. Its average readership of 532,000 was down from 671,000 the previous year.

Sister paper the Independent on Sunday also fell, with a 10 per cent drop to 548,000. It compared favourably to other Sunday qualities however, with the Observer falling by 20 per cent to 1.03 million and the Sunday Telegraph down by 16 per cent to 1.44 million. The Daily Star Sunday fared well along with its weekly edition, dropping only 3 per cent to 919,000.

Observer stablemate the Guardian performed better than its competition in the quality dailies market, with just a 4 per cent decline to 1.1 million. By comparison, the Times and the Telegraph both fell 12 per cent to 1.57 and 1.68 million respectively.

The Financial Times – which recorded a series of successes for 2010 in the digital arena when parent company Pearson published preliminary results today – suffered a significant readership fall according to the NRS with a 16 per cent year-on-year drop to 364,000.

In the mid-market dailies, the Daily Mail fell 4 per cent to 4.74 million and the Daily Express 10 per cent to 1.42 million.

According to the NRS, the survey was conducted by interviewing 36,000 people aged 15 or over, with the average interview taking 27 minutes.

The most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which works by auditing the number of copies of a newspaper distributed, showed that the Independent's new compact edition i had an average daily circulation of 133,472 copies in January.

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