The Times has returned to circulation growth for the first time in nearly a decade, claims its editor James Harding. "We have signed up more than 110,000 people who buy the digital editions of The Times every day and, as a result, the number of people buying The Times in print and on screen is up three percent year-on-year", he says.

The consequence – or so it would seem - is that around 100 jobs will go from The Times newspaper, amounting to one in seven staff. The Sunday Times will lose up to 20 permanent staff and a third of all casuals, expected to add up to 50 to 100 job losses in total.

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If the print media want to survive they need to radically re invent themselves. A smaller neater format like Private Eye would be nice - cheaper cover price - much less news print used and hopefully less column filling crap.

The rumour is that Murdoch is slashing the payroll bill before selling off his UK print interests, which are a tiny, barely profitable but very troublesome part of his portfolio.

If true it's a pity (for him) that he shut down the most profitable bit (NOTW) when he did.

The elephant in the room here is the BBC, its hard to compete with a 3.5 billion company that is state funded. Its a huge tumor crowding out all others. I wonder if papers in say france or germany are under as much pressure as they are here?

To a point Lord Copper ... the Telegraph - dire though it is - is making a profit, with open access. The Times is behind a paywall. There might be a connection.

I haven't seen the numbers for France, only for Germany: most if not all major newspapers have a decrease in publication numbers for quite a while yet. Germany has also a very extensive public broadcasting used to distribute well paid director positions to friends of the government. So I guess not much different from the UK. I don't think turkish newspapers are 'steeling' volume of the german ones, at least I have never read this kind of excuse.

Is he chopping hardcore journalists or the writers of the fluffy supplements?

(I expect you'll say there's not much difference )

Is there?

I get on with reading the times......... why? I am not quite sure perhaps it is something to do with picking holes in their childish reportage and woefully undergraduate editorial.

I've picked out this one from yesterdays effort: "How domination of the skies helped spell end for regime" byline, Deborah Haynes under the grand title of..... Defence Editor.

A line from her article went..........


I have no doubt that in Libya, the west's bombing did yield results but to conflate this spat, with a determined taliban in Afghanistan is not a comparison that can be made. In the original prosecution of the Iraq war, Saddam's [what was left of it after the 1st Gulf War] ragtags were straffed, stuffed and served up by allied air superiority, during the later insurgency, massive airpower was made less significant [though useful in certain ops and situations].

That the Times is a corporatist mirror for selling the 'joys' of corporatism and all their mates in industry and politics is a given, little attempt at disguising their obvious bias is ever made. Indeed, this shows up really well in their constant 'banging the drum' for green energy boondoggles, wind farms are great and domestic solar roof panels are super! CCS is still raved [so too MMGlobal warming and the EU/UN/IPCC emissions targets blah bloody blah] about and everything in the Times-Green-World is groovy!!

Why do I read it? Someone from the 'other side living' in the real world has to, we can't let the yuppies go on preening their egos and lovely bubble lives in isolation in Cameron-lalaland. God, when the EU goes tits up, there will be a wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst this lot.

But maybe, Mr. Murdoch is willing it, a little sooner for some.

"We have signed up more than 110,000 people who buy the digital editions of The Times every day and, as a result, the number of people buying The Times in print and on screen is up three percent year-on-year"

Wki says "The Times had an average daily circulation of 441205 in July 2011"

3% of that is 13,000. so 13,000 up after getting 110,000 means 97,000 down on the print edition. Measurement by thumb rather than in detail but it can't be that far off.