Be among the first to know the truth....

Will the late-lamented loon save the Courier-Mail's bacon for the second year running!
To be among the first to learn the answer to this question, keep reading this article and future editions of The Bug.
For if the answer is NO, here – quite frankly – will be the ONLY place in Brisbane and one of the few places in Australia where you will know the truth.
Let's fill you in as quickly as possible.
1. The Courier Mail's Monday to Friday circulation is in freefall. More on that later.
2. The Courier-Mail's circulation figures for the six months to September last year rose modestly on the back of the tragic death on the last day in August of the Princess of Wailes and her subsequent one-way, flower-strewn trip to her new island home.
3. Metropolitan newspaper circulation rises and falls are compared year to year in six months blocks of statistics released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
4. The people who run The Courier-Mail are hopeful that the 11 part Diana: The Untold Story magazine series they've been running and plugging endlessly for the past two weeks with the pathetic promotional line: Be among the first to know the truth! will either:
a) come close the matching the paper's sales in September last year sparked by the Loon's losing bout with a Paris underground concrete column; or
b) (and this is the best case scenario), even exceed them.
Be this the case, the paper will finally have something to crow about over its weekday sales.
It'll go something like this, around mid October, on Page 1: "Thank you, Queensland for making your Courier-Mail the most popular metropolitan daily newspaper in Brisbane. The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for the six months ended September 30 show a whopping 1.3 percent increase in circulation proving once again ...blah blah blah blah blah ad nauseam ....blah blah blah.... and to celebrate we're putting up our advertising rates again..."
Being the investigative journal of truth that it is, The Bug was going to chat to a number of newsagents to try to gauge how sales have been going through the Diana promotion but we couldn't be bothered. We'll wait 'til the ABC figures come out and try to find them in some non-Murdoch southern newspaper if the news isn't all that good for News Limited.
Even if the outcome of the Diana: The Untold Story promotion fails to match last year's sales, all is not lost. That old fall-back position for falling newspapers - readership - might make for some front-page breast thumping if the glossy series has passed through enough hands and the researchers ask the right questions.
The Bug has been critical in the past of The Courier-Mail's habit of stony silence if the stats are horrible and pathetic self-promotion if the figures are in the slightest bit floggable.
Our argument has always been that it might be okay for a fruiterer to put his best apples out front of the pile and hide the bruised ones inside. But The Courier-Mail, while also a business out to put the best light on its corporate endeavours, also has a duty to report both the good and bad news. We reason that if the paper is happy enough to report the downturns of the rest of the business world, it should have the guts and decency to report its own short-comings.
As mentioned earlier, The Courier's weekday papers performed poorly in the ABC figures for the six months to June 30 this year. Monday to Friday sales dropped a rather unhealthy 1.3 percent - 212,675 copies from the more than 215,000 plus recorded for the same period last year. Only one metropolitan paper, The Age in Melbourne, suffered a bigger drop.
The Courier's Saturday edition recorded a 1.8 percent increase, some good news but perhaps a worrying sign that readers are cutting out some of their mid-week purchases or buying less fish and chip takeaways.
The Courier's Monday to Friday slump takes on even more significance when you factor in that the paper's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, was reported back in April as saying the paper's daily sales had improved by about 2000 since they began printing the edition in Townsville some months ago. And in the Courier a week or so ago, Mitchell also sugar-coated a 10c cover price rise with glowing praise for the masthead and all its new bright and breezy sections and other recent innovations. Also factor in if you must the minor details that south-east Queensland is supposedly Australia's fastest growing population area and the Courier Mail is a Brisbane monopoly.
Is it any wonder the cynics among us simply ponder just how badly the weekday Courier would have performed if all these jolly good promotional things and favourable demographics hadn't been happening along the way.
And what of Mitchell's future at the Courier if the next lot of statistics don't reflect the amount of money being spent to try to lift sales to match or surpass last year when the Loon and Stuart Diver were being buried and unburied respectively.
Insiders up at Queensland Newspapers reckon too many more bad surveys and he'll be promoted sideways, upwards and outwards so fast his own circulation might be cause for grave concern.

inside the Curious-Snail and Sunday Snail

Readership slump is not news either, apparently.....

The Courier-Mail Monday to Friday readership slumped by 4.4 percent to 584,000 in the 12 months to June, the latest Roy Morgan Research readership statistics show.
Is this the first you've heard of this bad news? Our guess is it is, as the Courier continues its admirable policy of not reporting bad news - its own, that is.
The survey shows that only two mastheads out of the nation's metropolitan dailies dropped readership: The Age in Melbourne dipped 3 percent to 675,000 readers.
All other metro dailies improved: the Sydney Morning Herald up 5.5%; Sydney's Daily Telegraph up 0.5%; the Herald Sun in Melbourne up 0.7%, The Advertiser in Adelaide up 2.5 percent; and the West Australian up 0.4 percent. The Australian Financial Review went up a whopping 15.6 percent on the back of its decision 12 months ago to run a daily Page 3 colour nude pix, while The Australian's Monday to Friday edition rose by 4.3%.