Weekly New and Digital Homework

09/01/17 - The Sun losses exceed £60m as ad slump and hacking charges take toll (36)

Recently, it has seemed like Rupert Murdoch's The Sun just hasn't been able to catch a break. In 2016, they saw losses of more than £60 million. Although in 2015 they were at £79m, amounts like this are still huge. Contributors to it are declines in print advertising, redundancy costs and also phone-hacking charges which almost seem like they'll never leave the paper alone. How huge these losses are can be displayed particularly effective when you pit the paper against The Times. They reported a (pretax) loss of £5m in 2015 to the 3rd of July, mainly due to redundancy restructuring costs. Revenue for The Sun has also a drop of £10m, with a decline in print advertising not being able to be offset by other areas e.g. the paywall on its website (now no longer in place).

• The Sun made a loss of more than £60m last year as steep declines in print advertising, redundancy costs and phone-hacking charges battered the tabloid
• Times reported a pretax loss of £5m in the year to 3 July, down from a profit of £8.8m in 2015
• The Sun fared significantly worse, notching up a pretax loss of £62.8m for the same period last year
• The Sun narrowed its losses (£79m in 2015), mainly due to a significant reduction in charges relating to legal claims and costs relating to phone hacking
• The Sun also spent £14.8m on one-off restructuring costs and significantly boosted sales and marketing spend, from £55m to £75.9m
• Total revenues fell from £456m to £446m as a steep decline in print advertising failed to be offset by income from other areas
• The Sun said it had made £16m in profit last year, almost half the £29m in 2015
• Total revenues barely budged year-on-year, dropping from £342.5m to £341.6m
• Times Newspapers Limited, said there was a “solid” performance in print sales income, which grew to 182,000
• The Times spent almost £33m on sales and marketing last year

It'll be interesting how exactly The Sun deal with these losses this year. The introduction of a paywall definitely didn't work to be able to offset this, so what exactly will is unknown at the time. Perhaps the paper will eventually decide to take the approach of The Independent, being online only and perhaps prioritising digital media over the print counterpart and embrace more interactivity between the consumers and the paper.