Newspapers and magazines in Turkey have lost roughly half their readership over the past decade, with yearly circulation dropping from 2.24 billion to 1.18 billion for newspapers and from 140 million to 73 million for magazines, the Diken news website reported on Monday, citing Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) figures.
According to the data, newspaper readership plummeted 51 percent compared to 2010 and magazines lost 47 percent.
The number of newspapers has also declined, from 2,780 in 2010 to 2,337 in 2019.
In contrast, public advertising costs have been on an upward trend, steadily rising since at least 2016, according to figures obtained from the Press Advertising Agency (BİK), the state body responsible for regulating publicly funded advertisements.
Last year, 90.8 percent of newspapers were local publishers, while 7.3 percent were national and 1.9 percent were regional.
Turkey’s print media have undergone significant changes over the past five years with the government-ordered shutdown of scores of outlets critical of the government during a two-year state of emergency declared after a failed coup in July 2016 and the sale of the country’s largest media company, the Doğan Media Group, to a pro-government businessman in 2018.