NATIONAL daily newspapers were selling half a million fewer copies a day at the end of last year than in 2003, when they were again selling 500,000 fewer copies than in 2002. That is the bad news from the national newspaper industry: sales have fallen by a million copies a day in the space of two years.

The good news, given the growth of 24-hour TV news and the internet, is that 12 million nationals are still being sold each day, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The ABC’s December report shows that with only one exception the trends of most previous years were repeated in 2004. Upmarket papers are faring better than the traditional tabloids. The Sundays are suffering less than the dailies. The greatest suffering is at the two mass-market red-tops, The Sun and Daily Mirror, victims of the erosion of the traditional Andy Capp working class.

The best indication of newspaper trends comes from comparing average sales over the second half of last year. Sales of The Sun were down 150,000, or 4.4 per cent, and those of the Daily Mirror down by 162,000 or 8.4 per cent. Even Richard Desmond’s Daily Star, the circulation success of the past three years, was down year-on-year.

With the exception of the Sunday Mirror the worst performances were again from Trinity Mirror titles. Sales of the Daily Mirror and The People last month were both down year-on-year by 10 per cent, down to 1.7 million and 932,000 respectively.

Although there is a sense of inevitability about the decline of print editions of newspapers, neither editors nor managers are complacent. New editorial sections are being launched. The Daily Mail started two over the past few months – Escape, a weekend travel section, and Lifestyle on Mondays.

Saturday and Sunday readers are bombarded with free CDs or DVDs, which often attract up to 200,000 extra buyers – but who don’t return on Mondays. There is serious investment in online editions to ensure newspapers don’t miss out on the way most news will soon be delivered. And real, hard news still sells papers – sales of The Sun were up by between 60,000 and 70,000 in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Against this backdrop there was one editorial revolution that reversed declining sales. In terms of circulation, the two most successful papers last year were The Independent and The Times, the broadsheets-turned-compacts and the only dailies that achieved year-on-year sales increases. Using six-month averages, sales of The Independent were up 34,000, or 15 per cent, and those of The Times 27,000, or 4 per cent.

Those successes had an impact in the broadsheet market, with year-on-year sales of both The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian down by 14,500. The Guardian will join the compacts as soon as it can by launching a European-style newpaper size that is midway between tabloid and broadsheet. There is no news of The Daily Telegraph’s intentions.

The table shows the market shares within the former broadsheet sector for March to August 2003 (before the launch of the Independent and Times compacts) with the second half of 2004 (when these two were compacts). The figures represent the number of copies sold by each paper per 10,000 copies sold in their market. The table shows that The Independent was up by 157 copies and The Times by 83, against falls by their respective rivals.

Across all daily titles, the papers that increased their share as the red-tops dropped back were the Telegraph, Express, Star and, by the biggest margin, the Mail.

• I wrote last week that The Wall Street Journal’s circulation is 90,000. That referred only to its European edition. The Journal’s worldwide circulation is 2.2 million.

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