AFL and NRL grand finals kick circulation goals

The weekend’s AFL and NRL grand finals were a fascinating look at the development of modern national football codes.

The weekend’s AFL and NRL grand finals were a fascinating look at the development of modern national football codes and the effect of interstate expansion versus traditional suburban loyalties on newspaper sales. The wins by home town sentimental favourites could not have worked better for the media in Sydney and Melbourne.

At The Courier-Mail in the late 1990s an NRL win by the Brisbane Broncos or a State of Origin series win by Queensland would traditionally increase weekday sales by 50,000 on a base sale of 215,000. Circulations across all capital cities have fallen since then but big sports fixtures still boost sales and digital traffic.

Saturday’s AFL grand final ­between Melbourne battlers the Western Bulldogs and the Sydney Swans united Victorians behind the ­Bulldogs, who became everyone’s second-favourite team.

While a few original South Melbourne Bloods supporters ­remain loyal to the Swans in Victoria, the side was regularly ­portrayed in Melbourne as a bunch of Sydney “silvertails”.

For the Melbourne media, Saturday’s result could not have been better: a close game with often no more than a point separating the teams capped by a cracker fourth quarter when the sentimental local favourites broke the 62-year drought since their last flag in 1954 with a 22-point win.

As the country’s biggest-selling daily newspaper by far, the ­Monday-Friday Herald Sun still sells 330,000 print copies a day and Victorian editorial director Peter Blunden late last week ­expected that to increase by at least 30,000 on Sunday and Monday if the Bulldogs won.

Yesterday’s Sunday Herald Sun produced a 32-page souvenir wraparound of the match and posters of the final siren and the winning team. The paper also had three pages on the match in early general news, an editorial and five pages in the sport section. So it did not hold back.

“Footy is our biggest sales ­driver throughout the year, and it’s great news for us to have the Bulldogs in the grand final. Over the course of the weekend — ­Saturday, Sunday and Monday — we will publish close to 100 pages of football. That includes bonus lift-outs, wraparounds and posters,” Blunden said last week.

Herald Sun deputy editor Chris Tinkler was planning between five and nine pages of AFL coverage in early general news in today’s paper (nine for a Dogs win). A Storm NRL win would also be prominent in the early news pages. The paper would include a 16-page pictorial grand final liftout, and 10-12 pages of AFL in sport and four pages on the Storm game whichever side won. He said the Storm were developing a real following in the city.

In NSW, the media had been barking for a Bulldogs-style performance by sentimental Sydney favourite, Cronulla, which had never won a grand final. Last night’s 14-12 win capped a fairytale story with a 50-year maiden premiership. There was not the same focus on the AFL in Sydney during the past week.

Indeed, the editor of the nation’s largest-selling paper, The Sunday Telegraph, Mick Carroll, devoted 28 pages to a preview wraparound of the NRL grand final yesterday but 10 pages of the inside sport liftout to the AFL result. New Daily Telegraph editor Chris Dore says his paper has good relations with the Swans as well as with the Greater Western Sydney team that lost to the Bulldogs in the preliminary final, but that the real driver of sales in Sydney’s No 1 daily paper would always be last night’s NRL match.

In that respect all the Sydney and Melbourne papers were ­barracking for their home-town battler teams against newcomers from outside the traditional AFL or NRL heartlands.

The Tele last week focused hard on the Sutherland Shire that is home to the Sharks, led by NSW State of Origin captain Paul Gallen. Dore sent plenty of reporting and photographic firepower to the Shire and used the match to build the paper’s credentials in one of its former heartland sales areas.

“The problem for us in Sydney is the Storm always have been, and are, despised. Should they win it will be a turn-off in Sydney. No one will want to know,” Dore says.

Dore says that in recent decades Sutherland has really only been in the paper’s field of vision for the Cronulla riots in late 2005. He says his paper is often seen as a newspaper for western Sydney but actually sells more papers outside western Sydney than in the western catchment. As a city of villages, he sees an opportunity to use the NRL as a way to reconnect with traditional areas of newspaper readership.

Last year Dore was still editing The Courier-Mail and set something of a publishing precedent with the all-Queensland Brisbane Broncos versus North Queensland Cowboys grand final. He managed to get hotel copies of the Courier printed in Sydney for ­distribution to the tens of thousands of Queenslanders staying in the city for the thrilling 17-16 ­Cowboys victory. And because the match was played out of state and Monday was, as today, a public holiday in NSW and Queensland, he managed to extend large circulation rises of nearly 10 per cent into the Tuesday and Wednesday editions with commemorative specials for the return of the teams to Brisbane and Townsville.

He thought last week that a Cronulla win would give the Tele a 5 per cent circulation lift but it would be localised in the Shire.

Ironically, the Storm, even though based 1500km south of the Queensland-NSW border, will be firm favourites in the diehard NRL market of Queensland. New editor Lachlan Heywood pointed out that Queenslanders hated Cronulla captain Paul Gallen and hooker Michael Ennis, a former Broncos player, and loved the Storm because of the presence of Queensland-born State of Origin players in the Melbourne side.

“Up here, Storm captain Cameron Smith and halfback Cooper Cronk are Origin legends. While this match will not sell like last year’s we will still get a decent lift from a Storm win,” Heywood said.

At the national daily, sports editor Wally Mason thought both codes would work well for The Australian. “In both codes we have a national grand final so we will do well whatever the result. We don’t need to get our hands dirty barracking for one team or the other,” said the well-respected Mason.