Now in NSW, the proposed tobacco display laws will require retailers to spend a significant sum to convert the tobacco displays. For a typical shop, the costs are estimated would be about $8,000.

An immediate low-cost solution you may want to consider is converting the space to “hangsell” products like inkjets. This is fairly easy to do and should provide a short-term solution.

Here is one done in Victoria. See the area marked in red.

Reusing the tobacco space was also widely done in Western Australia when strict tobacco laws were recently introduced there.

VEXNEWS have always been negative to Fairfax for ideological reasons but their is truth in what they say here.

Most of us can see that something is wrong too as people we have known for years in Fairfax have suddenly gone.

The problem is much more than others such as News Corp mentioned here, Fairfax depends on advertising. Advertising for Fairfax is down and with these latest readership figures which apparently are the biggest drop ever since the Roy Morgan readership stats have been compiled their advertisers will be even less willing to pay for advertising. To the advertisers, it is simple if readership is 10% down then the advertising spot is worth 10% less.

Here I would argue that it is not just as Fairfax says the internet advertising is cheaper but that internet advertising is often better. We tried advertising for new staff in a Fairfax paper and got one response, on the internet using seek we got heaps.

Soon events in Fairfax could be very serious to newsagents.

This question will be answered this weekend with the latest promotion from News Limited on papermotion.

They are not giving much away to the public in their teaser-style advertisement here about the new technology of Papermotion that they are releasing in the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday.

Yesterday an email went from XchangeIT to many people. This email was withdrawn eleven minutes after being sent. That was long enough for many to get it. Those that got it emailed it out to many others. Almost immediately a competitor of ours publicly released it on his website so spreading it to everyone.

Now it feels like everyone has been calling us about it today.

What I can say is we are urgently seeking clarification on this email.

We are aware that it discusses important changes in the return system for almost every newsagent.

We are also aware that it directly affects POS DOS users.

As we prefer to be patient and accurate, rather than fast and inaccurate we are seeking clarification on many points on this email, we should have more information soon. Please wait.

On May 17th the Sunday Telegraph is going to print an interactive digital Papermotion photograph.

These when you put such a picture in front of a computer with a webcam you can see moving pictures in 3D imagine “When they put the Melbourne Cup on the front page of the newspaper, you’ll be able ..to watch a video of the horse winning the race.”

Whether it has a long-term benefit, I am dubious. As one critic said if I want to look at a race, I can go through the video link on the newspaper on-line website why do I need the newspaper? I think he has a valid point.

Still, as a novelty item, I am sure it will have enormous interest as they have a good promotion with it. They are giving their readers a chance to win one of 50 webcams. I hope it quickly goes to other states too.

Clearly, newspapers are certainly not standing still with technology.

I was asked to use our benchmarking project; to see what was happening with the current economy and its effect on newsagencies. This area is a region that has a high tourist trade. The study starts in 1997 and stops at the end of January 2009.

I asked if I could release the figures and was told that these would be okay. Here are our charts with my comments below.

<charts have been removed 19/11/2018>

Magazine sales they used to say were recession proof. If people were out of work, they still purchased them. Clearly this is no longer true.

No surprises here, as gambling has always been affected by the economy.

Papers sales were another said to be recession proof. If people were out of work, they still got them to find jobs. On-line sites have taken much of this away, so it is no longer recession proof.

Stationery sales now in newsagencies do appear to be recession proof. People need stationery. It does not depend much on tourist, little is purchased online plus newsagencies are competitive in price. Sales were stable during this period.

Tobacco, I took out a few shops here as some newsagents in the study told me that they were reducing this department.

I suppose if you are a smoker, you still need smokes. Interestingly here when the other departments went up, this one did not. Government policy will be the big problem here. Not everything can be put down to the economy.

When you look at the charts, you can see the impact of the global recession.

We are sending out our new advertisement to newsagents in Australia. It is titled 6 easy steps to squeeze more profit.

It is always frustrating to me when I go into a newsagency and see so many held back because of bad software. That is why this advertisement was produced to show you that software can genuinely help you save.

That it can help you make better business decisions.

That it can increase sales.

The advertisement is released now.

In 2007, we went to our users with a campaign to get them to start sending sales data. Writing and calling people to get them to send sales data. We asked people to do it and that campaign proved successful. 

From almost nothing, soon I was told that we were sending almost all the high-quality data. The problem was as this campaign went on, XchangeIT found it impossible to provide the data to keep it up. We needed information on who was not sent. XchangeIT could only provide data on who was sending.

With XchangeIT new systems, this problem is fixed. Soon many newsagents that are not sending sales data correctly will find their fees increased. This fee increase is unnecessary, as most of our users in XchangeIT can send sales data free so saving themselves money.

As well as that, without sales data, the newsagency cannot share in the new ordering system (SBR) which appears to increase magazine sales by 1.5%.

What we are trying to do is get a list from XchangeIT of people that are not sending sales data correctly and fix them up before the new charges start to come in September.

If you are not sending sales data and using Xchangeit, we have an information sheet explaining how to set up sales history 

Here is a recap of the recent retail Conference for the Marketing of Magazines and Books that just finished in Miami. Although the emphasis is on the US market, I found many point of relevance to us too. I particularly liked the Mythbusters section.

You should have received a letter from ACP explaining the new magazine distribution method.

The immediate concern by everyone now seems to be will it involve me in extra work as we have to stock receive (invoice) the same magazine many times? These concern we have already put to ACP during the tests. What we expect is that it will involve some extra stock receiving as it creates an automatic reorder amount if they forecast that you are likely to run out of stock. If it does get too much, you can drop out of the program if you want. But we are asking everyone to give it a chance, because it may lead to a better magazine supply.

Clearly the slide in advertising is affecting worldwide free newspapers, much more than paid one. Several oversea recently closed. I was reading a story here about one in Spain.

In Australia, now the circulation of free newspapers is low compared to paid newspapers. The biggest free paper is MX and it circulation (M-F average) figures are now about

Sydney 95,084
Melbourne 91,200
Queensland 40,609

Several people contacted us about what they felt was a dramatic increase in support charges just announced by a competitor. This competitor had offered no explanation for why the big increase was necessary.

See the table below and make your own decision, if these are dramatic increases.

Ask yourself, do you really see in 2009 service industries getting dearer are their main expenses interest payments, wage bill, rent, telephone etc going up? On the contrary, almost everyone is more concerned with deflation than inflation. Do you see the justification? The people that contacted us clearly did not see this price rise as fair or reasonable.

In comparison, POS Solutions charges $90/hour.

That is 74% less.

As we are expecting few increases this year so we see no reason to change it.

So we have formed the view from the evidence presented by these people that we too regard this increase as excessive and unjustified so we cannot blame people for complaining.

I think our advertising approach needs changing, as clearly there is a reason for us to emphasize fairness.

I decided to search on the old newspapers to find the first reference to an Australian newsagency. The first I could find was on Monday 16 July 1855

It lists here.

Melbourne Agency
Messrs. A. Gordon
Western Market
As the authorised agents for the Hobarton Mercury

This would have to be about when it began for us.

We are now contacting newspapers and magazine companies to learn what should happen during this seasonal period.

Now I feel the loss of staff at Fairfax. There are always some fine points that need clearing up on how to handle their various publications countrywide. The problem is these “new” staff although they have been there for years; they are new to these fine points.

We are scheduling our first draft of information sheets to go out on Monday as we are waiting for Fairfax.

Here is a tip for any newsagent, please do these needed changes in the last-minute because in this period much happens without forethought or planning.

But it is a good idea to read them now so come the day you know what to do. Then as amendments come through, which they always do this time of year we will edit these sheets and send them out again.

The editor and publisher report, although an American report, they do have a point here.

While reading this, I was thinking of here. In Australia now, circulation and readership are only slightly down. Advertising is going down, just look at the size of the Saturday papers today. Some of the costs in this report such as the expected rise of newsprint in the short term will not happen here as the major newspaper bought this when the dollar was high. But soon it will go up too as in the US. So one would expect newspaper revenue to decline. The only solution besides the cost-cutting we are seeing now is to increase cover price. That will drive circulation down too.

In the 1990s, we saw the afternoon paper died out. Maybe soon we could see the era of the no-newspaper city, here too. Maybe just national and local papers will be left.

Have a read and see what you think.

Just a few days ago, a newsagent told me that a major card company IT department suggested that I talk to him about using his stock sales report. He wants to look at sales trends and pocket turns for his cards in their shop.

The problem is that they change their designs often. So each week, they get more than twenty new designs arriving. To decide which section to put it into is often arbitrary, difficult to select and tedious.

Yet now thousands of newsagents do this all the time when one card company could do it. They do it as properly managed, cards using categories can increase sales by over 20%.

Why could a card company not supply proper categories for each card, as magazine companies do now? That would make cards much easier to display.

This mess has been going on for years. Yet nothing has happened. It is not from lack of meetings. In the last lot of meetings, a common category card system was promised on the 13 August 2007. That is over a year ago. Nothing happened. Unlike other departments in newsagencies, the only one without common categories is cards. Clearly, the card industry has failed newsagents.

Also if done, we could provide newsagents with some brilliant reports as we do with magazines. I am sure that this would result in similar savings to newsagents as in magazines.

The card supplier was either John Sands or Hallmark. I am not saying which as both are guilty.

In newsagency industry, healthy readership figures encourage advertisers to pay for advertisements so helping subsidise the price of newspapers and magazines and keeping the retail price low. The importance is so great to a publication that when you talk to their circulation managers they are much more concerned with the readership than circulation. That is one reason why we have oversupply.

The most influential survey on this is the Roy Morgan results in readership in Australia.

Recently, they have released their current results.

I decided to create a table of results for newspapers which you can see. These figures are in 1,000s please contact us for details.

As we do not see newspapers as a growing market but we need to keep what we have. So in this sense newspaper readership with its slight drop is acceptable, as to advertisers we can say what you had two years ago, we can offer you a similar result today. This is national, say locally in Tasmania you can see a terrible situation.

I decided to create a table of results for weekly magazines which you can see. These figures are also in 1,000s

As you can see, these are not stable. These have dropped by more than 10%. In the industry nationally, the weekly magazines are probably our greatest concern.

Note to create these tables, I did not use the link supplied but a confidential report that I subscribe too.

I confess there is no sales figure I take more seriously than newspapers as for most of my clients; it is the reason they exist and by extension so do we.

So I am always watching what happens with newspaper not just in Australia but in other countries like the US and Britain as they are close to us.

In Britain, the latest circulation figures are out for October 2008 and the results are disappointing. Here is my chart.

As you can see overall they are down about 5%.

Considering how important circulation of newspapers is to the newsagents there, it is no wonder to make up the loss in revenue due to fall in circulation they are starting to consider selling newspapers at higher prices than the recommended retail price.

I think you will find this interesting. It is an information sheet from the National Federation of Retail Newsagents (NFRN) in Britain.
It is available now.

Was it $26.00 and was the delivery fee $9.10?

Checkout what this guy got?

He might be more now. Check it out on ebay.
The Item number: 380079164438

Years ago I wrote that newsagents were missing a great opportunity to sell to collector - Newspapers, posters and magazines.

Here is what I wrote

Newspaper posters (Business tip)

Hold this thought, how many video library sells the old posters of movies.

If you think about it, many people want posters to hang on the wall. It’s a chance to remember and think about major events that are important to them.

So while I was looking though eBay, I discovered an idea that, I am sure, would interest you. Newspaper posters are sellable items. Most of you knew that but until eBay had little chance of accessing this memorabilia market. Well yow you can.

In case you are wondering what you can get for them on eBay! The following are some I checked off on eBay of newsstand poster announcing the death of Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter

The Australian newspaper poster went for $22.50
How many of you, just threw out $22.50 in the rubbish bin?

The daily tribune got $6.50

CAIRNS POST got $42.99

Apparently it’s the most valuable because that is where it happened. As well as that it’s looks nice and glossy. Still I bet quite a few of our client in Cairns there threw that one out too.

Doing a check how many newspaper posters for sale on eBay.

I suggest just keep them for a month and doing a collection called Australia remembers September 11, 2006, then October, November etc and then next year plan to do a year collection called Australia 2007 and putting that up for sale?

If some major event occurs then consider releasing a theme collection of newspaper posters.

Are wondering what the old newspaper went for? Well a set of four old newspapers on the same event went for $56.00 today.

Attached I have included a PDF sheet with GG returns form dates up until the end of 2010

I suggest that you keep it somewhere for reference.