The Joint National Readership Research (JNRR) results, which were released yesterday, make for sobering reading for the publishers of Irish women's magazines.
Woman's Way, Image, IT and U magazines all showed serious declines in readership figures. Comparing year-on-year figures, Woman's Way lost 9,000 readers, Image lost 15,000, IT is down by 18,000 and U magazine showed the greatest loss, of 31,000.
Two magazine publishers dominate this sector: Image Publications, headed by Mr Kevin Kelly, and Smurfit Communications, headed by Mr Peter McKenna. They are getting together, not just to challenge the figures, but to question how they are arrived at.
"It's absolutely not a question of sour grapes on our part," said Ms Grace Aungier, Image's advertising director. "Our ABCs have increased over nine consecutive surveys, so it doesn't make sense that our readership has fallen."
The Irish magazine industry's main argument against the figures is that the work of JNRR is designed to measure newspapers, which, it claims, are consumed in a completely different way to magazines.
Publishers argue that their magazines are read over a longer period by more people per issue than are newspapers. The JNRR survey, they say, does not take into account the number of times a single copy of a magazine might be read, such as in a doctor's waiting room.
However, Mr Robin Addis, from Lansdowne Market Research, which conducts the research, said the methodology used in the Republic is the same as in most readership surveys around the world and that newspapers and magazines are usually surveyed together.
He explained that people are shown a booklet with the mastheads of the various magazines and asked how often they have read or even seen one in the past year. They are then asked when was the last time they read or looked at a particular title, regardless of where they read it or the issue date of the title.
Of the two publishing groups, only Image is signed up for ABC auditing, which measures circulation, and Ms Aungier said it is these figures that are key, particularly when she is selling advertising space to the big British-based cosmetic houses.
"However, there's no denying that the JNRR figures are the recognised advertising currency," she said.
Despite the magazine industry's unhappiness with yesterday's figures, and its bullish talk, there is no escaping the continuing decline in demand for the current crop of Irish women's magazines.
