The world has changed and the tabloids have changed less and sold fewer. Today's episode of our subjective review of the national press, concentrating for once on the life of newspapers rather than their impending death, looks at what remains the largest sector of the market, the one dominated by the Sun on weekdays and the News of the World on Sundays.
The prominence of the tabloids in our national debate is a result of the near obsessive interest in them of the rest of the media and the political classes, which seems to increase as tabloid sales fall. Other professionals - teachers, businessmen, doctors, lawyers - never (in many cases have never) set eyes on a Sun or Mirror. Ask the noisy majority blaming the tabloids for sensationalism, making it up, smut, scandal and intrusion when they last bought or even saw one and they will reply "I wouldn't be seen dead . . ."
But journalists on national newspapers - and that includes editors of the serious papers - devour the tabloids and need little excuse to refer to them, even follow up their stories, in their own columns. The politicians monitor the tabloids, believing they hold the key to electability by telling them what the mass of voters really think. Despite the Sun's famous claims for "winning" elections, there is little evidence that it does, but this does not diminish party leaders' enthusiasm for audiences with Rupert Murdoch. For the rest of the educated classes the tabloids are there to be moaned about but not read.
So why have the tabloids lost so many readers? The figures are stark. Over the past 20 years the Mirror and Sun between them have suffered sales losses of one third, or nearly 2.5m copies. On Sundays it is worse: the News of the World, Sunday Mirror and People have lost nearly half their combined sales, or around 5.5m copies. The rate of decline increased over the past decade. These five titles are owned by two groups and the pain has been much greater for Trinity Mirror, owners of Mirror titles and the People, than Rupert Murdoch's News International, owner of the Sun and News of the World. I am leaving out, for now, the two Star titles which have a much shorter history. The Sun's circulation has fallen from 3.94m in 1987 to 3.13m today while the Daily Mirror has fallen from 3.15m to 1.56m. The News of the World has dropped from just under 5m to 3.3m, while the Sunday Mirror has fallen from 3m to less than 1.5m. The People is almost off the radar, plummeting from 2.9m to 0.74m.
There were clearly managerial failures behind the Mirror's decline, not least during the notorious period from 1984 to 1993 of Robert Maxwell's ownership when the paper lost almost a quarter of its circulation. But the Sun had overtaken the Mirror before Maxwell acquired it. The most significant event in modern tabloid history was Rupert Murdoch's purchase in 1969 of the then ailing Sun from the Mirror group. It was relaunched in the form we know today and under editors Larry Lamb and Kelvin MacKenzie became the dominant player in the tabloid market.
Leaving aside the general factors affecting all newspaper sales - new media technologies, converging media - why is life so much worse for the tabloids? The Daily Mirror was selling 5.25m in 1967. I was at university and had it delivered every day. Our student paper was in awe of it and we tried to emulate it in design and editorial approach. It was the classless paper that did not patronise. It took complex issues and explained them. Like today, it had trivia and fun but saw its role as to cover the whole news agenda in a way that made it accessible to all. It would investigate serious issues rather than the sexual activities of the not so famous. We didn't have celebrities then, just the famous, the stars and the heroes.
The golden age of the tabloids was one where society, and culture, was more stratified, when factory and other manual work dominated, when politicians commanded respect, when education was driving social mobility and when stars were glitzy. The tabloids have maintained their attempt to connect with "ordinary people" (more than two thirds of their readers are in the C2DE social groupings - skilled manual workers and below) and reflect their common interests, their "talking points", but have increasingly misunderstood their audiences. They have latched themselves to popular television and while that has moved downmarket they have gone further.
The Star, the minnow of the tabloid market, has become the "Daily Big Brother", running pages every day on the tacky exploits of the dysfunctional wannabes in the house. It describes itself at the "official" Big Brother newspaper, and its stories and pictures of the inmates tend to the pornographic. The Sun and Mirror, less tackily and less extensively, do the same. Both these papers run spreads - 3am in the Mirror, Bizarre in the Sun - on the bingeing nightlife of lesser or aspiring celebrities. They must worry that the recent magazine circulation figures suggest that celebrity gossip has peaked. The tabloids also feed off the soap operas, which probably makes more sense as they have greater staying power.
Tabloid investigations tend to feature infidelity by the famous (and not so famous), drug addiction of the same, or getting reporters to penetrate security at airports or Buckingham Palace. The leading investigative tabloid, the News of the World, had its fingers burned when it was found to have paid for illegally obtained mobile phone intercepts. The Mirror was found to have phoney photos to back allegations of Iraqi prisoner abuse by British troops.
So not only have there been scandals over investigative methods but the substance of the investigations has moved downmarket - the same has happened on television. What is more relevant to the decline of the tabloids is the impact their investigations make. It is harder to shock the public with such revelations than it was, particularly when there are genuinely shocking stories, such as terrorist attacks, around. I do not believe tabloid readers cared very much about David Beckham's affair with Rebecca Loos, or indeed David Blunkett's with Kimberly Quinn. I certainly don't believe readers are much affected by a tabloid reporter passing through Heathrow security with a concealed weapon. We'll read these stories, and may be entertained by them, but we are unlikely to be impressed.
The tabloids, particularly the Sun and Star, have more readers under 35 than other newspapers. The Star, unsurprisingly given its soft porn content, has the highest proportion of male readers of any paper. Newspapers pursue young readers because advertisers like them (although really what they like are affluent young readers). In the case of the tabloids this may be less of an advantage. The emphasis on sex and semi-explicit pictures makes them less likely to survive the settling down life stage. Many parents with young children will be reluctant to expose them to the tabloids.
This explains the Daily Mail's older age profile - it is more respectable - and its success. It sells more than the Mirror and is closing the gap on the Sun. No longer is it axiomatic that the tabloids have the largest circulations. What they have failed to recognise, or have recognised but realised they can do nothing about, is the decline of working-class culture or community. More people than ever describe themselves as middle class, and middle-class people do not read the Sun or Mirror. So could the decline of the tabloids be reversed? Probably not. Any suggestion that moving upmarket was the answer was kicked into touch by Piers Morgan's decision to try it when he edited the Mirror. At the 2001 Belfast conference of the Society of Editors, Morgan publicly renounced Big Brother journalism. He said that he had detected a new hunger for serious news that had at first been driven by fear after 9/11 but was now born out of serious interest. He quoted the words of a former Mirror editor, Sylvester Bolam: "The Mirror's a sensational paper, but sensationalism doesn't mean the distortion of the truth. It means the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader."
"I genuinely believe we're on to something here," said Morgan, and went on to change his paper radically. This meant serious content written by serious journalists. John Pilger returned and the paper adopted a strongly anti-Iraq war stance. Celebrity gossip was out. As he recalls in his book The Insider, 18 months later Morgan was sending a mea culpa email to his chief executive Sly Bailey after monthly sales figures had, as he put it, "fallen off a cliff". He had misjudged the way Mirror readers would respond to the start of the war, with his paper attacking the war while the sons of his readers were under enemy attack in Iraq. Maybe it was the latter point rather than the new seriousness of the paper, the issue rather than the philosophy. Whichever, it hardly sent out signals that changing direction was the route to recovery. The Sun increased the circulation gap, and has continued to do so.
In an age when journalists are as little trusted as politicians - both at the bottom of the league - tabloid journalists are the least trusted. That is not fair. Some of the best journalists work for tabloids and the techniques of tabloid journalism are the hardest to acquire. The ideas that go into tabloids, the presentational devices employed, the economy of language, the directness of views and the irreverence of the Sun at its best are as impressive as ever. It is the editorial agenda that has gone awry. The political reporting, when it is there, of both Sun and Mirror remains sharp. The Sun, particularly, understands populist issues, and it will be a long time before the politicians can ignore that. The Sun's views on crime and punishment, Europe, asylum and the nanny state still reflect a strong vein of opinion.
And both the leading tabloids know how to cover a massive lottery win. It's a definitive tabloid story. And it always would have been.
· Peter Cole is professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield