So it occurred to me that with all the rhetoric currently floating around about the merits of newspapers and how vital they are to our western culture, it would be useful to actually do a bit of research. Now the relative merits of print versus online can be debated till the cows come in so instead of launching into another theoretical and philosophical essay I decided to deal with something a bit more concrete.
Perusing the petty cash tin I decided that I could afford to conduct a pretty basic analysis of a small cross section of the daily and weekend editions of Australia’s major newpapers. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff, just laborious measuring and counting of what is actually in the daily newspaper.
For the purpose of this exercise I intend to look at The Financial Review, The Australian, The Age, The Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald. Its not anything like a broad sample but you get that. If someone wants to defray my costs I will happily pull them all apart however this little sample is intended to be indicative rather than definitive so be warned.
The first cab of the rank is The Financial Review, a tabloid format yielding about 185 column centimeters (c.cm) with five columns across each of which is usually about 5cm. Monday’s edition had 56 pages.
For your three dollars this is what you get on the front page –
- Banner 37c.cm (20%)
- Ad 25 c.cm bottom (13%)
- Approximate “News” content 122.5c.cm (66%)
A breakdown of the news content for the front page goes like this -
- Photo 3*10c.cm ( 16%)
- Headlines (incl WSpace) 30c.cm (16%)
- News 5*4 + 2*10 + 5*4= 60 (32%)
The mathematical geniuses will quickly spot that the percentages don’t quite add up to 100% so I should qualify these results and all those that follow with a general rounding error of around 5%. When you look at all the white space in a newspaper that’s not a bad fudge figure.
As for the remaining 55 pages, the total breakdowns are something like -
- Journalism – 40%
- Graphics and photos – 37.5% *
- Advertising – 11%
- Headlines – 9%
Of course one thing that should be noted about the Fin Review is 14 out the 56 pages (25%) are completely dedicated to the absolutely vital business of reporting the latest stock market figures. I have chosen to throw those figures in with the Graphics/Photo category because it makes it easier to compare the Fin to other newspapers. If you treat the financial figures as a separate component the breakdown looks like this -
- Journalism – 40%
- Financial data – 23%
- Graphics and photos – 14%
- Advertising – 11%
- Headlines – 9%
Tomorrow I will have some rough numbers for journalists and other sources that are attributed in the Fin Review.
