There are two ways of calculating a publication's success. One is counting sales (the ABC way). The other is by a massive poll (the National Readership Survey way). But polling - as the NRS's own client services manager admits - has its problems: 'Our estimates are based on a relatively large sample of 36,000 adults per annum but, as with any other survey ... those estimates are subject to sampling variation. Differences in NRS estimates from one period to the next are therefore not necessarily an indication of an increase or decline in the number of readers.'
That's fair and honest enough - and, to be ultra-fair, the latest NRS catalogue of readership falls is very broadly in line with what ABC shows, too. Things are not euphoric in Newsprint City. But obtuse variation is still a perplexing game. Try the FT, supposedly down 22 per cent in a year in the UK. But in ABC terms there's no drop year-on-year at all, rather a rise from 118,234 to 119,726. Try the Independent, up 24 per cent on sampling, but 3,000 down on copies sold. Or, most puzzling of all, take two of the nation's best-selling TV listings magazines. TV Choice - from Bauer - had 1,287,773 paying customers on ABC's report for January to June this year, but (changing accounting periods slightly) only 1,472,000 readers on NRS. IPC's What's on TV, by contrast, had 1,509,519 buyers from ABC - and a stonking 3,915,000 readers from NRS.
The two magazines are close in content and close in audience, yet we're asked to believe that the Bauer competitor has 1.1 readers per copy, while IPC'S finest has way over twice that pull. Alas, it doesn't make sense. It must be just another sampling stumble.
Who's listening to the voice of America now?
A couple of weeks spent travelling Europe, idly pushing TV buttons in hotel bedrooms, produces ubiquities and oddities. America's most clunky soap, Days of our Lives, on French terrestrial every morning, painstakingly dubbed into Dieu's own language? Or ancient slabs of Ironside in Catalan, courtesy of Madrid subsidies for minority tongues? The dead weight of American exports has never seemed more crushing. And yet, fascinatingly, it ain't necessarily so. Indeed, Professor Jeremy Tunstall has just written a successor to his magisterial 1977 study, The Media Are American. It is called The Media Were American.
Tunstall's thesis is simple, but jolting. Of course America still floods the world with movies, music and TV shows. And, of course, their combined value climbs higher and higher. But if we're talking something diff erent - market share - then the US is in headlong decline, and has been for nearly 50 years. Discount around 100 annual hours of bigbudget movies and the residue is a pitiful, shrivelled thing.
India, China, Brazil and Japan (to name but four) have media exports of their own that equal or outstrip any imports. China, with 1.3 billion people, relies overwhelmingly on home production in local languages. So, with a bow to Bollywood, does India. Egypt looks after the Middle East.
The bigger Latin American countries make most of their own popular media now - and export lurid soaps to Spanish-speaking channels everywhere, including the US.
Two facts linger most vividly from the Tunstall analysis. One is that 'at least 85 per cent of the US population consume media which is not made in the USA'. And the other is that the prime continuing importers of American entertainment are the bigger Western European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain.
What we see on those hotel bedroom TVs, in short, is in no sense the future. It is our continuing - and increasingly isolated - reliance on a cultural voice and model that the rest of the world has begun to discount.
Can Google and Yahoo strike a new balance? Perhaps, if you think that surfing is just another national game. But the cash that flows from a seat in the stalls, or the front parlour, now runs in a quite different direction.
