In the last five years half a million AB readers have deserted the broadsheets. Why?

There is one person in the world whom I would love to meet. Or maybe two. I am thinking of the propagandist who writes the monthly front-page ‘brief’ in the Times extolling the paper’s circulation performance. His (or her?) counterpart on the Daily Telegraph would be interesting, too, though this person has fallen rather silent recently. The genius at the Times was at work last Saturday. The general gist was that the newspaper was inexorably closing the gap on the Telegraph. A casual reader might suppose that the newspapers are neck-and-neck in the circulation race.

This is not so. What has happened, as I suggested several weeks ago might be the case, is that the Daily Telegraph has given up the costly battle to remain above a daily sale of one million copies. It has reduced its number of foreign sales and so-called bulk copies. But so has – or had, since it happened in the summer – the Times, which has allowed itself to slip below its own psychologically important benchmark of 700,000 copies a day. In October the paper claimed an average daily sale of 687,611, while the Daily Telegraph posted a figure of 972,596. Over the past six months, in comparison with the same period last year, the circulation of the Times has declined by 2.63 per cent, while that of the Telegraph has fallen by 3.18 per cent. I would say that makes my point. There has been very little change in the relationship of the two newspapers so far as their sales are concerned. Both are down a little.