Respected American news sites The Hill and ABC News were widely mocked on social media over the weekend after reporting firework displays across the UK as spontaneous celebrations of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the US Presidential election. Guido was disappointed to discover the lack of recognition for his namesake…

They also claimed bells were ringing in Paris at the news. Liberation’s fact checking service dryly stated that the diocese of Paris denies this information.

“We have not received any instructions to ring the bells in honour of Biden’s victory. So, in Paris, no bell rang following this news. We sometimes ring the bells on political subjects, at the request of the mayor of Paris. This is the case, for example, every year at the end of August, to celebrate the liberation of Paris in 1945. But yesterday, there were no requests.”

ABC have now deleted the tweet…

Guido picked up a copy of this month’s painfully woke GQ, which has just hit the news stands. In it the Daily Mail’s editor, Geordie Grieg, has granted only the second interview of his editorship. The first interview with the FT resulted in a complete car crash after he dissed the great Paul Dacre to such a degree that Dacre wrote to the FT to deliver a monumental slap down to his successor. His second interview is timed to coincide with the Daily Mail finally surpassing The Sun in daily sales. Or as the hagiographic Matt Kelly puts it:

“… now the Mail has in all actualité, attained the one great prize to elude even Dacre, you’d have to have a heart of pure weapons-grade vitriol to begrudge Grieg and his team their moment in the sun, as they passed The Sun to become the bestselling newspaper in the country.”

This interview was done in June, before the newspaper industry forced ABC to cease publishing sales figures that have dramatically plummeted during the pandemic. Guido however has managed to prise open the undisclosed ABC circulation figures and can reveal that The Sun in July returned to being the tabloid primus inter pares. Geordie’s day in the sun was short and the interview’s whole premise was overtaken in July by cold hard print sales figures…The latest figures (not published) by the Audit Bureau of Circulation show that in July The Sun outsold the Daily Mail by 1,030,000 to 999,000 – both titles down double digit percentages from pre-pandemic. Geordie doesn’t have much luck with his annual interviews…

The Daily Star has seen the biggest post-lockdown readership recovery of any national newspaper, according to new figures from ABC. A boost of 5% on last month…

No other paid-for national newspaper grew its circulation by more than 3% in June, meaning the dead tree press’ recovery as a whole has slowed month-on-month compared to May. Yesterday’s front page was just another of the Star’s recent stellar front page politics coverage…

Keep it up lads…

This data from the Reuters Institute is stark. The pandemic has made printed newspapers a minor source of news, most people get their news online or from television. More than twice as many people get their news via the likes of Twitter and Facebook as from newspapers. So who is really mainstream now?

Guido has been calling newspapers the Dead Tree Press for over a decade. The situation for many national newspapers is dire, year after year of double-digit falling newsstand sales, disappearing local newspapers unable to compete with ultra-local advertising solutions from the tech-media giants which are objectively better than they can provide.  All exacerbated and undercut by unfair competition from the BBC’s monolithic, monocultural empire of local websites and radio stations. The print editions are in a death spiral…

How is the Dead Tree Press coping? They have suspended ABC audited circulation reporting, the transparency* newspapers always call for, is for other people. Not publishing their circulation figures is like not publishing their obituaries. They are still dying.