Claudia de Breij finds the declining circulation figures of De Telegraaf extremely striking. She has the idea that this could be due to Wierd Duk. “And Ronald Plasterk.”
Print media such as newspapers and magazines have been experiencing sharply declining circulation figures for years, because people have mainly started reading digitally. Claudia de Breij recently delved into these declining figures and finds it striking that, according to her, the circulation of De Telegraaf is declining faster than that of competing media.
Hetze
Claudia reads De Telegraaf daily and calls it ‘the newspaper of the constantly excited indignation of Wierd Duk and Ronald Plasterk’. She does appreciate the sharp pieces from economics journalist Martin Visser and court reporter Saskia Belleman.
“Precisely because such good journalism is done at that newspaper, I am sometimes shocked by the smear-like tone in some other pieces,” she says in the VARA guide.
Circulation figures
What does Claudia think of the circulation figures? “A table recently appeared comparing the number of newspaper subscribers. How many were there in 2006 and how many are there now? That provides a fascinating insight.”
NRC and Volkskrant have remained the same or increased slightly, around 300 thousand subscribers, says Claudia. “The AD has lost more than 100,000 in those twenty years and is now around 350,000, but the most striking is De Telegraaf: from 644,114 to 390,946. It has lost more than 250,000 subscribers!”
Duk and Plasterk
Claudia thinks this is very strange. “How do they view this at De Telegraaf? Has that been investigated? Could it be that the continuous undermining of readers’ trust in institutions also affects trust in the newspaper?”
She concludes: “Or could it be that there are not nearly as many citizens angry as Duk and Plasterk think?”