Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I was reading a recent post by Antony Mayfield about how a rise in circulation does not necessarily mean revenue growth. His comments about the Guardian’s investment and innovation online got me thinking though.

Current methods to decide circulation and listenership figures in Ireland seem to becoming a bit outdated because they aren’t capturing the role of New Media in how they digest information. For example, I was talking to someone that worked on a late night talk show for one of Dublin’s leading radio stations and mentioned the ongoing battle for listeners between the station and its closest rival. It was around the time that the latest bunch of listenership figures were released and his station was marginally behind. He noted though that their listenership was definitely higher than that reported, you only had to look at the number of SMS messages coming in every night for proof.

With more Irish radio stations offering their shows in the form of podcasts, newspapers setting up online subscriptions for their websites and media organisations engaging with their audience through use of tools like email and SMS, should the media have more input when their circulation or listenership figure is being decided?

While surveys may only need to be slightly tweaked to reflect the growing role of the Internet in how people get their news, I think that to be fair to certain outlets, their online efforts should be recorded in some way also. For example, there is a large number of Irish people living abroad that tune into RTE or read the Irish Times online, but this doesn’t seem to be reflected.

As more content becomes more distributed via a variety of platforms, surely this information should be more accurately recorded given the fact that media organisations seem to live and die by circulation or listenership figures.

Technorati Tags: Media, Piaras Kelly, Public Relations