National Press Round-Up – March ABCs

Among the quality titles the Sunday Telegraph continues to perform well and in the period October ’96-March ’97, it showed the largest year on year increase at 30.15% to 863,147 copies sold. The Sunday Times still dominates with the largest circulation among the quality titles with 1.344 million copies sold. Both of the Independent titles performed the worst in the quality sector: the Independent saw sales fall by almost 10% and the Independent On Sunday‘s circulation fell by 11.91%.

As usual both of the Mail titles saw good year on year growth while the Express titles saw sales drop. The Express and Express On Sunday will, however, take encouragement from the fact that both saw an increase in sales on last month: the daily title sold an extra 6,282 copies while the Sunday title added 2,335 copies. In the long term however the Express On Sunday‘s sales fell 10.77% while the Express dropped 4.54% to 1.205 million.

The tabloid market continues to appear to be in decline. All titles experienced year on year drops in sales, though the two News International titles, the Sun and the News Of The World, showed slight increases in sales compared to last month.