Free papers continue to gain in popularity
Readers are continuing to turn to free newspapers to inform themselves, while daily papers with paid subscriptions are on the slide, a study shows.
The free German-language paper 20 Minuten boasts the country’s largest circulation with close to 1.3 million readers a day – an increase of four per cent since September 2007, according to figures released on Tuesday by the Zurich-based media research institute, Wemf.
The French version of the same paper now has 470,000 readers a day, up 20.5 per cent over the last year, making it the fastest growing paper in the country.
Paid-subscription daily papers in both French and German have lost tens of thousands of readers since September 2007.
The popular paid tabloid, Blick, continued a downward spiral and lost 22,000 German-language readers, while Le Matin, the largest paid French-language daily, lost 13,000 subscribers.
Other losers included the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), which lost two per cent to 299,000 readers.
The study also found that the Swiss still largely prefer to get their news from print media, with 91.4 per cent of the population reading at least one newspaper regularly.
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