Fairfax Media celebrates strong readership

MEDIA STATEMENT
Friday 29 May 2009

Fairfax Media celebrates strong readership across its publications

Fairfax Media has defied international trends showing increased readership in the last 12 months to March 2009.

In the latest Nielsen National Readership Survey, Fairfax Media’s total group readership across newspapers, magazines, and online now reaches more New Zealanders aged 15+ than any other major publisher.

Group Executive Editor Paul Thompson says the results show that New Zealanders are relying on trusted sources of news, information and entertainment more than ever before.

“These readership results prove to the doomsayers that print media is very much alive and well. Audiences have generally grown across the board for our titles, with weekend readership in particular showing exceptional growth.”

On a typical day, Waikato Times reaches an audience of 105,000, up an impressive 8,000 readers year on year, while The Dominion Post and The Press also showed strong results reaching 250,000 (up 5,000) and 227,000 (up 1,000) readers aged 15+ respectively.

The strong performance of Fairfax metropolitan papers has contributed to growth in our total weekend newspaper offering* to reach 1.4 million New Zealanders aged 15+, nearly half a million more than the nearest competing publisher.

Cementing Fairfax Media’s ownership of the weekend market is the overwhelming success of Your Weekend magazine. Launched in September 2008, the publication is inserted into Waikato Times, The Dominion Post and The Press. Your Weekend+ reaches a phenomenal 482,000 readers aged 10+, which translates to Your Weekend being the fifth most popular weekly magazine in the country.

In addition, Sunday magazine (inserted inside the Sunday Star-Times) is New Zealand’s fourth best read weekly magazine, increasing its reach to 567,000 readers aged 10+, up 26,000 (or 4.8%) year on year. With TV Guide, this result now translates that Fairfax Media publishes three of the five most popular weekly magazine titles in the New Zealand market.

Fairfax Sunday newspapers (Sunday Star-Times and Sunday News) are also stand-out performers in the weekend market having experienced considerable readership growth while the competitor Sunday title lost readers.

Together the Fairfax Sundays have a combined reach of 819,000 readers aged 10+, up 5% year on year. Of those New Zealanders who read a Sunday newspaper, 80.3% read a Fairfax Sunday.

On its own, the Sunday Star-Times attracted an additional 16,000 readers in the survey to reach 608,000 New Zealanders aged 10+.

Fairfax Media’s Group Sales and Marketing Manager, Sandra King says newspapers and magazines across the Fairfax stable are strong brands that showcase high quality, original environments that engage with readers on many levels.

“While Fairfax Media is committed to using a range of multi-media platforms to deliver content, these results show that print media will continue to remain an integral part of the advertising mix well into the future,” she says.

“On the magazine front, 14 of 17 Fairfax magazine titles measured in the survey experienced readership growth year on year. That’s a phenomenal result in today’s market.”

Under the direction of new editor Eric Matthews, Cuisine maintained its leadership in the food category increasing readership by 10,000 to reach 393,000 people aged 10+. NZ Gardener continues to grow its national connection, up a massive 63,000 readers (28.1%) year on year to reach 287,000 people aged 10+, emulating the emerging cocooning lifestyle trend.

In addition, South Island magazine title Avenues, showed impressive gains up 32.7% to reach 65,000 readers and NZ House & Garden remains the leader in its category with 563,000 readers, twice the readership of its nearest competitor.

And Fairfax Media continues to grow its presence in the Auckland newspaper market, with Auckland Suburbans reaching double the audience of its nearest community competitor to touch 680,000 or 65.8% of Aucklanders aged 15+ on an average day.

Paul Thompson says that the company’s readership growth project has played a key role in helping to attract more readers.

“We have an initiative underway across the company that is particularly focused on finding out what our readers want and making sure we give it to them. It’s great to see that readers are rewarding the additional effort by our dedicated and talented team of 800 journalists by consuming our products in greater quantity than ever before.”

NOTE TO EDITOR: Fairfax Media connects with 84.6% of all New Zealanders aged 15+ across its multi-media platforms, equivalent to 2.86 million New Zealanders.

*Total weekend newspaper offering includes all Saturday editions of daily newspapers, Sunday newspapers and weekend measured newspaper inserted magazines.

Source : Nielsen National Readership Survey Q2 2008 – Q1 2009
Nielsen National Readership Survey Q1 2008 - Q4 2008 (Previous Period)
Nielsen National Readership Survey Q2 2007 – Q1 2008 (Previous Year)
+Nielsen National Readership Survey Q4 2008 – Q1 2009 (net unduplicated readership)

ENDS

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