THE Fiji Times has more quality content and holds a bigger reach than its closest competitor.

Those were the findings of a survey of public perceptions of The Fiji Times and the Fiji Sun conducted by The Fiji Times and market research agency Tebbutt Research.

Of the 1020 adults surveyed, 74.8 per cent said The Fiji Times produced content of high or very high quality compared with 56.4 per cent for the Fiji Sun.

Only 2.3 per cent of respondents said the content of The Fiji Times was either very low or low compared with 8.5 per cent who said the same for Fiji Sun content.

In terms of exclusive readership, 25.2 per cent said they read The Fiji Times only while 7.3 per cent of respondents said they read the Fiji Sun exclusively.

A further 41.1 per cent of respondents said they did not favour either of the dailies and read both papers.

The Fiji Times also topped the recency of reading newspapers category with 81.6 per cent indicating they had read The Fiji Times in the 30 days before the survey compared with 65.8 per cent for the Fiji Sun.

Online news readers showed similar news consumption habits with 29 per cent of survey respondents saying they visited The Fiji Times online website in the 30 days prior to the survey compared with 14.7 per cent visiting the Fiji Sun website.

The Fiji Times was also found to have a larger reach across all divisions of Fiji for both urban and rural respondents.

A total of 86.5 per cent of urban respondents and 76.6 per cent of rural respondents said they had read The Fiji Times within the last 30 days.

Comparatively, 70.8 per cent of respondents in urban areas and 60.7 per cent of respondents in rural areas had read the Fiji Sun in the past 30 days indicating there were those who read both newspapers across Fiji.