By Dominic Ponsford
The Times is still the “top people’s paper”, according to a survey of Britain’s managers.
The biannual British Business Survey uses a sample of 3,000 to
determine the media habits of a group of consumers with an average
salary of £53,900.
It found that The Times has overtaken the Daily Mail as the most popular paper in this group.
When
asked what paper they read on a given date, 21.9 per cent of
respondents said The Times (20 per cent two years ago) compared with
21.8 per cent saying the Daily Mail (23.2 per cent in 2003).
Times editor Robert Thomson said: “Business coverage is a true indicator of a newspaper’s commitment to quality journalism.”
Although
the Financial Times was fourth placed overall behind the Daily
Telegraph, it claimed a victory by having the highest average income
per reader, at £82,498. It also said that its readers controlled the
biggest annual budgets,at an average of £1,832,557, and said they drove
the most expensive cars, with an average price of £21,662.
In the Sunday market The Sunday Times remains the top read for managers, followed by the Mail on Sunday.
Times Newspapers scored a hat trick by having the website which managers aremost likely to have visited in the past four weeks.
The
survey is underwritten by Times Newspapers, Telegraph Group, Guardian
Newspapers, The Economist and the Financial Times. They, together with
research firm Ipsos Media, decide which titles to include in the
questionnaire.
This time they decided to exclude red-top tabloids from the list.
In-flight
magazine High Life was the monthly title managers were most likely to
say they had read in the past four weeks and The Economist was their
favoured weekly magazine, closely followed by Computer Weekly.
David
Lucas from Ipsos Media said: “The data shows that, while British execs
remain heavy readers of traditional print news sources, they are also
embracing online options.
“This suggests leading executives are
not replacing their traditional news sources in the internet era, but
rather adding the internet as one more medium to keep ahead in their
ever-changing worlds.”
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