http://www.roymorgan.com/news/press-releases/2011/1340/

Roy Morgan's surveys are considered to being extremely influential on readership of newspaper and magazine readership. People are certainly reading these publications, and the figures should make the advertisers happy. Which is extremely important as today it is advertisers support that is vital.

The retail on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald in South East Queensland and far northern NSW, will increase by $0.20 on Saturday and Sunday only from Saturday May 14, 2011

Please click here for details.

There has been quite a lot of discussion as to why the benchmarking figures for newsagents showed a similar figure to the ABC circulation figures, yet the newspaper sales are off.

The reason is home deliveries. Traditionally, newsagents have always seen home delivery as the base of their business which they can depend on, and these figures support this claim as the newspaper sales decline is much less for home deliveries than retail sales.

3.6% down in retail sales
1.7% down in home delivery

It works out to approx 2.6% down overall, which is what newsagents reported.

Based on these figures, efforts by the publisher to get as many people from retail sales to home deliveries should be encouraged by newsagents.

A few POS Browser customers have reported problems adding the Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide to their customer orders. If you are having difficulty adding the TV Guide to a customer order after following the instructions, the most likely cause is that the item does not appear in the TV Guide Special Offer. When editing a special offer, remember that the item prompts are search prompts. To make the item appear, enter the description of the item (or a part thereof) into the applicable Item prompt and then press Enter. A list of items appears. Select the correct item from the list and it will be placed in the Item prompt.

Regards
Bruce

The latest quarterly newspaper circulation figures are almost everywhere down according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations report.

The only exceptions are very marginal increases in Fairfax. What makes it worse is that these figures include a period with the floods in Queensland and Victoria, which generated a lot of interest with the public. Queensland is a very high loss but much of the loss there may be an actual loss of sales in Queensland as many retailers did not receive newspapers to sell.

It is almost a percent higher than what we expected, it is now 3.8% down. This may be because newsagents maybe affected less than other retailers.

Weekly magazines also went down, much of this could be because many retailers could not get stock but their total sales are down 6.58% in the three months to March. Women magazines took a big hit.

A more detailed ABC report on newspapers is available here.

{report has been removed]

We have just been informed by Network that they had timeout issues while processing the RTD (return) files on Monday and Tuesday.

This meant that many of our clients' return forms did not process correctly and their supplemental returns form did not get produced.

Network is now reprocessing all the returns files, and the supplementary returns' forms will be available for the Newsagent on Net Online when this is done.

I suggest you check your Network returns for this week.

Abnormally high number of newsagents reported a problem with their returns forms today.

This is under investigation. It could and probably is several reasons.

As we have been recently advising people to audit their magazines manually, it may be that they are finding something wrong with their procedures, or it could be something more.

Please check whether your return forms over the last few weeks have been processed. This may not be as easy as one client reported a weekly return form was rejected, but the next week had both that week and the rejected one. That is why you need to check over the past few weeks.

If you have any concerns please contact us.

Almost all newspapers sub contract out the work for writing newspapers. Instead of the newspaper having to produce a section for entertainment, they can hire a subcontractor who works for many newspapers.

The sub contractor writes for many publications say an entertainment section. Because they have more specialization and probably budget, they can probably to be fair, do a better job. Then they make a few local changes and at a fraction of the cost of an original production the newspaper has an entertainment section. If the subcontractor uses contractors in India or the Philippines it can be cheaper still. Click here for some details of what they do.

The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age will soon greatly expand out their sub-editing. That may cost hundreds of reporters’ jobs.

Much our newspapers today are not a local product, soon even less of it will be. It will make the newspaper cheaper and possibly a better quality but this will probably make the local newspaper less attractive to the consumer who are looking at a local perspective, reduce the point of difference between the newspapers, and make the newspaper less competitive to the internet.

Note the same is happening in magazines but its effect is probably much less here.

A newsagent in NSW was putting his instant returns into the wrong week. We estimate that every week about 35 magazines were physically returned but were not put into the return form. To a magazine supplier, if it is not on the return form it does not exist, so no credit.

35 (magazines) x 52.2 (weeks) x 7 years x $5.85 (average cost of a magazine) = $74,815.65

That is almost exactly what he is now asking from Gordan and Gotch.

One of our installers picked it up, while upgrading them to our latest windows software.

Ultimately, the blame is because they made an error but surely in the seven years they should have done an audit of at least one of their weekly return forms.

Here is a simple, quick and effective way to audit your return form.

Count the number of magazines you send back to the supplier while packing them up. To count 700 magazines assuming it took me three seconds each would take about 30 minutes. Actually, since you are packing them anyway, you can count while packing so taking almost no extra time.

Then when you finalise your returns in our software, there is a total quantity figure for the number of magazines. Confirm that your count agrees with this. Then once the magazine returns come back from the supplier, on the bottom they have a magazine quantity number. This is something we asked for and both the major magazine companies have done. Check that this is your count. You then have an audit trail.

I strongly suggest that you do this. It might save you over the next seven years $80,000.

What some clients did was look at the reports for products that are currently delivering good sales. If the product could have anything to do with the Royal Wedding they moved it to a display in a prominent position centred around this wedding. The related merchandise placed together in the display sold well.

Regards
Bruce

PS I wonder if something like that could be used for bin Laden.

We have received a few queries regarding clarification of the instructions for stopping subagent deliveries of the Financial Review over the Easter break. To stop subagent deliveries for the Financial Review, follow these steps:

1. Select Subagent Deliveries from the Subagents menu.
2. Select the Extras / Alter Orders tab.
3. On the next row of tabs, select the Bulk Editing tab.
4. Make sure that the Select Week Ending dropdown is set to 24/04/2011.
5. In the Select Days section, choose Friday and Saturday.
6. In the Select Order section, choose Dailies.
7. In the dropdown, select FIN or FR.
8. Press the button labelled Set orders to zero for the selected days.
9. If both FIN and FR are selectable at step 7, repeat steps 7 and 8 for the other value of the dropdown.
10. Repeat steps 4 to 9 for the week ending 1/05/2011, choosing Monday and Tuesday for the days of the week at step 5.
11. Select the Selection tab.
12. Make sure that the Select Week Ending dropdown is set to 24/04/2011.
13. Click the Create or Refresh Week button.
14. On the dialogue, select Continue without adjusting.
15. Verify that the subagent orders for FIN and FR have been cleared for Friday and Saturday for all subagents.
16. Repeat steps 12 to 15 for Monday and Tuesday orders for the week ending 1/05/2011.

Regards
Bruce

Some agents have logged calls regarding the non-publication of various newspapers over the Easter break and how to implement this in our windows software

For delivery customers , a set of instructions have been prepared for the Australian adapted for these other newspapers. When adapting these instructions, first determine which newspapers are affected and the dates when the publication of these newspapers is to be suspended over the Easter break. When determining the correct suspension dates, remember that in most cases our windows software treats the newspaper that is published on each day of the week as a separate item. Thus, each day over Easter on which a newspaper is not published must be handled separately with a period of suspension of one week for each such newspaper edition. For example, a newspaper that is normally published on Friday but is not published on Good Friday this year will have a Stop date of 22/4/11 and a Start date of 29/4/11, one week later.

Newspapers that have bumper editions over the Easter break need to be handled in a similar manner to the Easter edition of The Age,determine the newspapers that will be affected with the prices for the Easter edition, and if the Easter prices are different then create the updated delivery prices as described for The Age in the above link. When doing so, make sure that the entry for the old price is also created so that that newspaper reverts to its old price after Easter.

Have a happy Easter.

Regards
Bruce

By now all clients affected by the Melbourne Age price increase should have received instructions on how to do the change. What is confusing people is the price rise is over two weeks. The reason for this is because Easter is in the middle.

I recommend that those on windows version enter it all now, so when the dates come around it will automatically adjust. There is only one entry for this system.

Our DOS clients need to enter in the information in two hits. Once now and second time on the 25 April 2011.

Overall I estimate that in a typical newsagency it is approximately an 11% increase.

There is a lot of interest this year, with the Australian public and the Cannes Film Festival.

An idea may be for you to make a film section in your shop for these people.

The Melbourne Age price will increase their recommended retail price by $0.20 a day.

However the price rise will be done over two weeks

The new prices will be

Weekday $1.70
Saturday $2.70
Sunday $2.20

Weekday price rise starts from Monday 18 April 2011

Then there will be a weeks delay and then the weekend prices will be increased

Saturday: from Saturday 30 April 2011
Sunday: from Sunday 1 May 2011.

News Limited have requested submissions on this.

What I hope is before any decision is made we are consulted as what sometimes happens is a formula is adopted that must be programmed into our system.

Although this is not a problem to our windows software clients as they get automatic updates unfortunately like all system designed over eleven years ago before Microsoft went to automatic updates, our DOS system clients uses the older system where the user has to load updates from the web.

I was asked to put together some figures and by going through a few newsagent databases, I would estimate that EFTpos is currently just over 10% of the total revenue. The big issue here are their product mix and subagents as generally subagents today pay by EFTpos.

As most newsagents are reluctant to accept EFTpos payments under $15, the value of EFTpos under $15, I estimate is less than 1%. It sort of makes a lie of the claim that businesses like newsagents will be relatively unaffected by the increase in EFTpos rates as their transactions are generally small.

What we recommend to our clients is that they introduce a small surcharge for EFTpos transactions once the increase comes. Our software can handle manage this fee automatically.

IBISWorld reports are one of the main ones used by many large corporations in Australia, including banks. So what they say tends to be not just important because of what they predict but also because of their influence in the marketplace.

Still I think you will find this report interesting. The bottom line they expect the strong Australian dollar, and our growing economy will drive magazine sales up at a rate of 1.5% a year over the next five years.

The report is available here.

The first for this year's major Golf tournaments is being played now. I am sure that many you have keen golfers as clients. It may be an idea to decorate the shop and make a golfer section.

Today Michael Varger from POS Solutions had a long discussion with XChangeIT over the issue of sales data on behalf of a client.

What Michael Varger was requesting is that our client be allowed to do online returns although they cannot give sales data. The reason for that is our client for magazines is a distributor and so does not handle sales through a point of sale system.

XChangeIT answer was fairly long. Much of it was actually quite detailed but Michael Varger assures me that their answer could effectively be summarized as NO.

He was also told by XChangeIT that soon all their clients will be required to send sales data.

Although I think it is a tough decision, I do agree that it is the best one for the industry. Newsagents should send sales data. Soon I am sure it will be mandatory.