Fleet Street ‘bingo war’

Press, 29 October 1981, Page 9

Fleet Street ‘bingo war’

NZPA-Reuter London Britain’s tabloid newspapers, which usually rely on sex, show business, and sport to sell millions of copies daily, have now turned to bingo in a circulation war that could kill off at least one.

Press pundits have dubbed the battle the “tabloid dance of death” and the main topic along Fleet Street, the bustling heart of London’s newspaper industry, is which newspaper will die first. Eight national newspapers are spending millions of pounds to tap the British devotion to bingo and lure new readers by offering individual prizes up to £ 100,000 ($222,000). The papers claim spectacular jumps in circulation as a result. However, astute people inside and outside the newspaper industry say the vast cost of running bingo could prove suicidal. Newspaper bingo was pioneered by provincial papers, but their modest schemes were swept aside when the “Daily Star,” the newest of the London tabloids, launched the first nationwide game last June. ■ The cost of waging the “bingo war” is expected to exceed £2O million ($44

million) by the end of this year.

Newspaper bingo works like this: the tabloid mails cards to its readers. The cards, all different, are divided into lines of boxes carrying a series of numbers. Each day, the paper publishes a list of numbers picked at random for the readers to match against their cards. If a reader fills a line, he claims his prize.

The effect on circulation has been startling.' The “Star,” part of Express newspapers owned by the industrial group Trafalgar House, needed to almost double its circulation of 1.3 million to make a profit. After launching bingo, it put on 100,000 extra copies a month.

Its rival, the “Sun,” part of Rupert Murdoch’s group and Britain’s biggest selling daily, arrested a falling circulation of 3.6 million and says it has hoisted the figure to 4.1 million in a matter of months.

Other papers, notably the “Daily Mirror,” were forced to join in. By mid-October, eight daily and Sunday papers were in the game, their front-page headlines screaming forth the big prizes to be won.

Graham Murdock, of the mass communications centre at Leicester University, says the “bingo war” is reminiscent of the circulation battles in Fleet Street's heyday of the 19305.

But there is one important difference this time. The papers are fighting for a smaller market.

Mr Murdock says that in the last two decades circulation figures have dipped as competiton grew from television and other electronic entertainments. Escalating production costs forced prices up and people bought fewer copies.

Consequently profits fell and papers desperate to stay afloat sought new ways of buoying up circulation. “Bingo is part of a terminal struggle for a dimishing pool of • readers,” he said. “It’s a last-ditch attempt to stop the rot and it is not over-dramatic to talk of the death of a paper."

He said there was no guarantee that new readers attracted by bingo would continue to buy a paper after it ended, or that extra sales would pay for the huge prizes and promotion costs.