The Sydney Morning Herald has retained its position as Australia’s top masthead, with more readers across all platforms than any other over the 12 months to March this year.
Total News figures from the industry’s official data provider, Roy Morgan, showed 7.7 million people, or about one in three Australians, read the masthead. It puts the Herald ahead of its traditional NSW rival, the News Corp-owned Daily Telegraph, which has 3.98 million readers.
The Sydney Morning Herald has retained its position as Australia’s top masthead.Credit: Dylan Coker
The Herald’s sister paper, The Age, cemented its place as the most-read Victorian masthead with 5.2 million readers, and the outlets’ Good Weekend magazine was the premier Saturday insert. It had an average print readership of 754,000 people, up 4 per cent for the quarter.
Print was a particular bright spot for this masthead, with the Monday to Friday newspaper recording 17 per cent growth year over year and quarterly growth of 4 per cent, taking its average readership per edition to 417,000. It marks the sixth consecutive quarter of growth for the physical newspaper, while the Sun Herald’s Sunday print edition was steady, up 1 per cent, to a readership of 423,000. In the last four weeks, an average of almost 1.9 million people read the printed paper.
The Herald and Age’s Good Food and Traveller titles had audiences of 1.49 million and 1.56 million, respectively, each month. Sunday Life had an average issue print readership of 419,000, and Domain defied a softening real estate market, seeing annual growth of 7 per cent and quarterly growth of 5 per cent, to record an average issue print readership of 537,000.
“I am proud of our team for achieving such a strong result, particularly given the challenging environment all publishers are finding themselves in right now,” Herald editor Bevan Shields said.
“The Herald continues to set the benchmark for quality journalism in Australia and I want to thank our subscribers and readers for their continued support for what we do.”
Roy Morgan’s data covers all news brands and digital news websites and tracks audiences on Apple News and Google News.
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