Overall their audit showed a 4.8% drop in magazine sales which is less then newspapers. Magazine companies have certainly not given up as the number of titles went up.

No real pattern I can see except that the biggest drop was in weekly.

I think Pacific would be overall pleased with the result in tough retail times their drop was only 1%.

You can get a copy of the report [Link removed from site] here and make your own conclusions.

http://www.bandt.com.au/getmedia/f8c8606d-fab2-4420-8580-34f173fdc9d2/A…

The latest circulation figures from the ABC are now the OCT-Dec 2012 figures.

Most worrying is that newspaper circulations have continued to decline and the rate of decline is still accelerating. Currently it is 6.5% down on the same quarter Oct-Dec 2011.

Looking at the figures, much but not all the decline is in Sunday papers, Fairfax (who must be very worried about these figures) and NSW.

It is also clear that the major newspapers in each region are not declining as much as the minor ones. This does show the trend to one newspaper town is growing.

A list of instructions for Paper changes for 2012 Christmas and New Years' periods are available. If you require further assistance with changes to papers, please get in touch with the PosSolutions Help Desk at (03) 9597 7222

The publishers of Australia have just released their first Australian magazine publishing survey.

I think most readers here will find it interesting. One point that I thought was fascinating was that 68% felt the newsagency channel was important.

The the ppt presentation is available here.

The executive summary here.

[Links were removed]

[LINK REMOVED]

Tony Philbrick who is the manager of South Bank Beach news and Alf Maccioni, who is the CEO of the Australian Newsagent's Federation discussed with Steve Austin from ABC this morning the new News Ltd T2020 plan to consolidate delivery areas.

I think the big issue for newsagents was brought up here finally, what will be the effect of loss of circulation on shop sales in the newsagency?

Rent in Europe is very expensive as such newsagencies there tend to cram.

As I wrote earlier greeting cards are very small.

Lines that is much bigger than in Australia are children toys, which tend to be everywhere and smokes. It is smokes that is the growth industry in Europe in newsagencies.

One point is we have a unique service for our clients that can allow us to examine their data to suggest possible improvements. One department that comes up a lot is the drink department, our data checks suggest that Australian newsagencies are not doing, as well as they should in drinks. European newsagents must have got this message as they are much bigger in drinks then Australian newsagencies.

Here are some pictures

[Removed]

In Pinewood newsagency, a large section of magazines area have been replaced by mobile and ipad cases

Here are some pictures

If you want to know more please contact

Cyril
Neeto - The Pines
Shop 32/181 Reynolds Road
Doncaster East Vic 3109

Ph: 03 98427944
Fax: 03 98424229

GNS had offered newsagents a website for ecommerce free. We have been doing a review of this site on behalf of our clients. Although this review is still going on, it does appear that with the latest improvements that it was now good. What I particularly liked was the ability for the newsagent to upload his own stock. I also thought the school book section was good too.

We will be coming out shortly with some more tools to make it even better for our clients.

The big plus of course for our clients is that the GNS website is free. No one percent fee plus extra fees like so many other sites and packages charge.

Another free site I recommend all our clients use is facebook but I will discuss that later.

Update 22/9/20: The YourNewsagent website nolonger exists

I will be there right near the GNS stand.

I think it will be well attended, the 2012 GNS WA Market Fair, showed attendance numbers were up on last year. That was despite the rain.

At 4:30 PM EST today, Derek Hinch will be interviewing Eugene Ahern from Nextra Bulleen Plaza newsagency in Melbourne on the drive programme about the HWT consolidation program.

There is a lot of comments about the latest proposals from HWT called T2020. 

I actually was interviewed extensively about it by the HWT consultants before they wrote their report. Parts of what was being proposed I heard from my clients too.

Many are looking at this proposal and seeing their margin dropping from 25% to 12.5%. That is a big blow to some. Interestingly for some like my client interviewed about it in the daily telegraph here, margin will go up by 2%.

The core of the proposal is that they intend to replace many newsagencies with one newsagency. This agency they propose will deliver 10,000 newspapers a day.

That would be a substantial entity which would need to cover a lot of territory. As a punt depending on the size of the area, probably 10 to 20 staff looking after about 4,000 active customers (so you could double that to 8,000 customers on the books) together with about 200 subagents.

We have a few clients with those sort of figures. To do such a job would require a substantial setup cost, a depot, trucks, plastic wrap machines, a good computer system, etc. Anyone planing to do this would require a lot of money upfront probably the cheapest way to do it would be for many newsagents to voluntarily merge their runs. Much of the equipment these people have will be useless soon anyway.

One problem here is that the mapping of these areas are to be done by HWT. These areas will not follow the existing territories. This means that it will be harder for a voluntary group to be created.

Some other points that I did not like were the areas are assigned by tender, as such there is no-good will. If someone created such an entity, lost the tender the next time it comes around, then they would lose all.

No compensation to people that have existing territories and that are going to find their newspaper margins slashed in half.

Another issue is what is going to happen with Fairfax. It is marginal enough for many newsagencies now to do Farfax with HWT. If the agencies have no HWT to deliver many are just going to drop Fairfax. Many Fairfax subscribers could be left with no deliveries.

One issue I would like to see discussed which is briefly brought up in the FAQ is

Q: Once T2020 is implemented, there doesn’t seem to be much to differentiate a retail newsagent from a sub-agent. What will News Limited to do to distinguish a retail newsagent?

A: We will continue to invest in the branding and in-store merchandising solutions for retail newsagents that differentiate newsagents from other channels.

I suspect that this and other questions are not needed to be worked out as clearly, they have already been decided.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2012/08/narky-newsagent-shines-light…

You can hear here a discussion in the ABC over one newsagent who facing a slowing down of newspaper sales, who has been sending messages to customers pleading with people to buy some stationery, biscuits to keep him in business.

If you deal with Fairfax, I think you will find this article in the SMH here interesting.

Fairfax is selling off assets, and intends to make another round of major staff cuts, which must reduce its product appeal further to the public. They are also now considering that if their revenue continues to fall sharply, to move to a digital-only service. I am sure this will speed up the progress of the model of a one newspaper town in Australia.

Furthermore, they are going to a compact-size tabloid format something they should have done ages ago. This is probably too late now to matter as the readers on public transport who were complaining for years have long since gone.

Fairfax have issued their plan for the future, it is available here.

Update: Part of the restructuring of Fairfax from what I understand is that The Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, will be merged making it almost the same paper.

Despite what has been a bad retail period, magazine readership was not all bad news. Some are up particularly those in women's fashions like Madison and Frankie.

Some are expected such as MasterChef to go down, since it is not doing well in its rating on TV.

Of major concern now are TV magazines, those targeted at men like Zoo Weekly and motorcycling magazines.

Roy Morgan Research released its newspaper readership figures for the year ending March 2012. They confirm the ABC circulation figures.

These were released today, everything down. Looking though the figures the main reason is that Victoria, NSW and Queensland in that order went down. The big losers tend to be Fairfax's publications. News Ltd, I noticed tend to be much more stable, Monday to Friday looks better than Sunday.

According to the publishers, newspaper sales are down as people are migrating to be digital.

I decided to check with a few newsagents first, what is interesting is that several did not report these falls. What they think is happening is much of this fall is due to many peripheral sellers (subagents) of newspapers who are no longer handling newspapers. Furthermore, they think some of the drop is because many people are dropping marginal runs. If so maybe people are switching to digital as they have no choice.

A while ago, I blogged that Fairfax shares were doing badly here.

I was concerned then as Fairfax shares were 86 cents, then they went down to 69.5 cents. Then part of the reason could be explained as much of the ASX went down too. It went up with the market but now, unfortunately, the slide has not stopped, shares in Fairfax Media are today hit the lowest point in the company’s history of 69 cents. This is despite that the ASX as a whole has moved upwards since.

How it will affect us all remains to be seen. I can only imagine more of the same. More cuts, including layoffs, years ago Fairfax before they did anything would send a few people over; they would discuss possible changes and scenarios. I used to see their reps at newsagencies; their senior reps were regulars at our user meetings.

Now I think the number of people have gone n Fairfax has affected service levels. People I have worked with for years are no longer there. The new guys seem to change around a lot. I do not see how they can collect the relevant experience simply because they keep changing around. A good distribution executive needs years on the job to learn.

The last major price change was disgracefully handled. The advice is given only in the last minute, much of the important details were missing, such as the dates and there was a refusal to supply details. Their attitude I think could be described as “We do not care."

For a company like Fairfax, the distribution should be one of the top priorities I wonder what other departments are similarly affected and maybe these lower prices on their share reflect some of these concerns by the shareholder.

Note: If Fairfax believes that they can get the revenue required from digital and drop printing in the short term, I think they are dreaming and maybe that is what the shareholders think too.

Nielsen's data released today showed advertisement measured by pages fell 4% in 2011.

Pacific Magazines declined 2%. ACP Magazines declined 4%, and Fairfax Magazines had a 31% decline (now that would hurt).

Here is a radio interview on the closure of country newspaper distributions with Carolyn Doherty from the Australian Newsagents' Federation and Brad Layton the owner of a country newsagency in New South Wales.

I thought it was very good. The points were clearly made. I was disappointed that no-one from Fairfax was there to respond.

One issue that I think should be mentioned is that it is all well and good to complain, but nothing was said about what could be done to try to fix the situation. For example, why was the local newsagent not armed with special offers from News Limited that is still delivering there in an attempt to save these seventy five (75) clients that he has possibly lost?

The Newspaper works is the industry body for the major newspaper companies in Australia.

They have just produced to recent reports on newspapers in Australia

State of Australian Newspapers

Newspaper fast facts

Both I think many will find quite surprising. These I think confirms what I have been saying for a long time that newspapers are still a good product. They bring plenty of people into the shop, the margins are reasonable, take up only a small space, etc. but newsagents need to change to accommodate the new market realities.

Read it and make your own mind up.