WAN-IFRA releases World Press Trends 2012

The data shows:

• 2.5 billion people read a newspaper in print regularly.
  
• Newspaper circulation grew by 1.1 per cent globally last year, to 512 million copies, and 4.2 per cent between 2007 and 2011. The growing newspaper business in Asia has more than offset circulation losses elsewhere in the world.
  
• While digital platforms are helping newspapers increase their audiences, they are as yet not proving to be a sufficient source of revenue.

World Press Trends 2012, available free to WAN-IFRA members and for sale to non-members, is a new, more concise version than in previous years, which includes an overview of circulation, advertising, digital and other worldwide trends, regional perspectives from leading publishers and data from 75 countries in comparative table format.

The tables cover newspaper circulation, reach, advertising revenues, numbers of internet and broadband users, as well as demographic information, from 2007 to 2011.

Read full details about the report.

The new World Press Trends database, available through yearly subscription for individuals or companies, provides an option to those who need more. The database includes individual country reports, aggregated tables and also allows users to generate custom reports. Users can choose from a large number of criteria - for example, a comparison of circulation and advertising revenues among selected countries - to produce reports that meet their own specific needs. These can be downloaded in Excel to enable in-depth analysis, benchmarks and historic trends.

The database includes a print-on-demand function that automatically formats the tables, text and data, to look much as they did in the former printed version. Data can also be exported into Excel files.

Full details can be found at www.wan-ifra.org/wpt.

WAN-IFRA collects most of its own data from a large number of dedicated contributors worldwide, an enormous undertaking on a global scale and one that depends on its vast network of newspaper associations, online publishers, newspapers and researchers. But World Press Trends is also enhanced by statistics and information provided by WAN-IFRA partners and other sources - some of the most renowned research organisations in the world - including Zenith Optimedia, Comscore, IPSOS, the World Bank, the International Telecommunications Union, the International Federation of Audit Bureaux of Circulation, and more.

As new trends emerge, WAN-IFRA will add new data sets and is currently seeking to quantify such topics as how digital and social media are changing the concept and process of content gathering and dissemination; how aggregation impacts the news business; and how digital business models change the traditional newspaper business.