The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) today published the 2012 edition of World Press Trends, its annual report on the state of the global newspaper industry.
At the same time, it introduced a new era for World Press Trends with the launch of a user-friendly database for those who need additional data and the flexible functions that a database provides.
The data shows:
- 2.5 billion people read a newspaper in print regularly.
- Newspaper circulation grew by 1.1 per cent globally last year, to 512 million copies, and 4.2 per cent between 2007 and 2011. The growing newspaper business in Asia has more than offset circulation losses elsewhere in the world.
- While digital platforms are helping newspapers increase their audiences, they are as yet not proving to be a sufficient source of revenue.
World Press Trends 2012, available free to WAN-IFRA members and for sale to non-members, is a new, more concise version than in previous years, yet contains most of the pertinent data on trends in the industry. The report includes an overview of circulation, advertising, digital and other worldwide trends, regional perspectives from leading publishers and data from 75 countries in comparative table format.
The tables cover newspaper circulation, reach, advertising revenues, numbers of internet and broadband users, as well as demographic information, from 2007 to 2011.
The new World Press Trends database, available through yearly subscription for individuals or companies, provides an option to those who need more. The database includes individual country reports, aggregated tables and also allows users to generate custom reports. Users can choose from a large number of criteria – for example, a comparison of circulation and advertising revenues among selected countries -- to produce reports that meet their own specific needs. These can be downloaded in Excel to enable in-depth analysis, benchmarks and historic trends.
The database includes a print-on-demand function that automatically formats the tables, text and data, to look much as they did in the former printed version. Data can also be exported into Excel files.
