Straight Talk
WE rang up one of the twin-hatter councillors the other day to ask him questions about the incinerator. He gave us some quotes and a broadside, too.
“You are running a witch hunt against the twin hatters” said Mr Michael Langwade. “You should stop before you lose any more readers.”
Mr Langwade, whose share in council payments this financial year is £15,619.25p so far, was not at the borough meeting which voted unanimously for legal action against the incinerator, and he was not at the county scrutiny committee which agreed to press ahead with the plant.
While you might feel that a councillor who is paid to attend meetings and represent his patch at county and borough level should at least attend such important meetings and say his piece, it is interesting that he should consider this paper’s stance against the incinerator as being one which is “losing us readers”.
I don’t know Mr Langwade at all, but he doesn’t strike me as the sort of chap who pores at any length over his local newspaper’s sales statistics. Heavens, I’m the Editor and even I don’t do much of that.
It’s much more likely that the county spin machine has armed him with some kind of briefing, a warm comforting statistical soup saying don’t worry what they say, people aren’t reading local papers any more. They’re on the way out.
Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to be ignorant of the true facts, least of all Mr Langwade, so here’s some helpful, up-to-date information.
Virtually all local and regional papers have shown a drop in sales in recent years. The papers that don’t show a decline normally include free and “bulk” discounted sales in their figures. Our view is that any paid-for paper distributed free is not a true “sale”.
So in a normal week the Lynn News will sell, in the true sense of the word, about 38,000 copies, sometimes substantially more if something has happened to boost sales above average.
That’s 38,000 true sales every single week, with people handing over their hard-earned money at the newsagents or getting the paper delivered to their door.
They estimate that each copy is read by two or more people, so Cllr Langwade and the county spin doctors can do the maths on that one. In anyone’s book, that’s an awful lot of people.
But there’s more. Oh yes. There’s the internet, where the statistics are booming.
If we have a story that catches the public’s attention (like the incinerator?) we can get a huge spike in hits on our website. Our videos, where we try for the offbeat (have you seen the snake up the tree, the Army horses on the beach or the murder appeal in Russian?) are also proving very popular.
The real measure of a website is the number of “unique users” – individual people who log-on. Latest figures show we had 77,521 unique users in January, creating 589,471 hits. Our videos attracted 186,744 views. In local paper terms, that makes us one of the top sites in the country.
Many of those users do not buy the paper, so they are new blood. A fresh audience to add to the 38,000 who buy the printed version.
This is not blowing our own trumpet. It’s just in the interests of getting the facts straight. And we are not seeking to influence our readers over the incinerator, just to support and inform. The readers can make up their own minds about the issue, and about the effectiveness and focus, or otherwise, of their county and borough councillors.
Here, as a comparison, are some stats concerning Mr Langwade. They are fairly typical.
Norfolk County Council election on June 4, 2009 – Gaywood South division: Langwade 865 votes, electorate 9,436, turnout 28.57 per cent. West Norfolk Council election on May 5, 2011 – Gaywood North Bank ward (three seats): Langwade 849 votes, electorate 5,958, turnout 38.23 per cent.
Remember, 65,516 voters said “no” in the borough referendum. I think it must be fairly obvious where the declining market is.
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Weather for King's Lynn
Sunday 27 May 2012
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