Credentials, press and reviews, in full

Cells marked “redacted” are measurements of how much of a show’s central box-office allocation sold, temporarily withheld pending a review of data use with the festival organisers. The remaining columns are unchanged.

Shows with at least three past dates, as the pooled table above. The third column is the comparison group the odds ratio actually uses — shows in the SAME genre making no award claim — so the row reconstructs: 62.7 against 51.1 is ×1.60. It used to print the genre’s overall base instead, which includes the claimants and reconstructs to the wrong ratio; corrected on 2026-08-25. Both intervals exclude 1 and they overlap heavily; theatre’s 116 shows are thin next to comedy’s 284. Read the direction, not the second decimal, and do not read the two rows as different findings.

Cells marked “redacted” are measurements of how much of a show’s central box-office allocation sold, temporarily withheld pending a review of data use with the festival organisers. The remaining columns are unchanged.

• National pressGuardian, Times, Telegraph…33.6% n=3,808
• Overseas pressNYT, Rolling Stone, Aus/NZ25.4% n=1,427
• Comedy tradeChortle, Beyond the Joke20.4% n=1,589
• Fringe review sitesBroadway Baby, ThreeWeeks…16.8% n=2,572
• Arts & theatre tradeThe Stage, The List, Time Out16.6% n=2,435
• Scottish pressScotsman, Herald14.2% n=1,830
• No outlet quoted1,809 shows — the default13.3% n=25,894

Each show counted once, at the top of what it holds, on operators that report both outcomes. The seven bars are 39,555 dates; the population behind them is 39,683. 1,809 shows in it name no recognised outlet at all, and the six quoting tiers hold 810 shows between them. The 128 dates that are in the population and not on the chart are an eighth tier — “Personal / broadcast”, where the best thing a listing can claim is a named critic or a broadcaster rather than a masthead — and it is the highest rate on the board, 52.3% over 8 shows, interval 43.7 to 60.8. It gets no bar for the reason Wales and Northern Ireland get no bar in the origin chart further down: eight shows and an interval seventeen points wide cannot be ordered against anything drawn here, and a bar above national press would assert exactly that ordering. It is named here rather than folded into a neighbouring tier, because folding it would move some other tier’s rate without saying so. Read every row as “shows that advertise this outlet”, never “shows this outlet reviewed” — nobody prints a bad review, so each population is self-selected upward, and none of it is checked against a press archive.

Odds ratios against listings quoting no recognised outlet, Mantel–Haenszel, stratified by venue operator and then also by genre. The last column compares each outlet only against shows quoting some OTHER publication, which removes the has-any-press advantage — it is the column that separates a masthead worth having from one that merely accompanies a well-booked show. Outlets under 10 shows or 60 dates in the population cannot appear here at all; of the 43 that clear that floor this table shows 18, chosen to span the range rather than by any rule — press-outlets.py prints all of them and is the list to read if you want an outlet this one leaves out. The omitted rows include several with odds above the Guardian’s, among them the BBC at 3.46 and Theatre Weekly at 2.40.

Comedy 9,253 dates, theatre 8,406, on operators that report both outcomes. Odds ratios within venue operator, against listings quoting no outlet. Theatre’s comedy-trade row is suppressed — too few dates to publish. Snapshot fringe-2026-08-19.db — this cut is not part of press-figures.json and has not been rerun at the season-final cutoff above.

• ★★★★★ national80 shows36.1% n=1,419
• ★★★★ national125 shows33.5% n=1,948
• National, no stars printed157 shows29.2% n=2,622
• ★★★★★ trade109 shows26.6% n=1,975
• ★★★★★ Fringe site173 shows24.9% n=2,967
• ★★★★ trade153 shows22.7% n=2,671
• ★★★★ Fringe site115 shows12.8% n=1,956
• No outlet quoted1,809 shows13.3% n=25,894

Stars are read from the asterisks printed immediately before the attribution, which is the convention every listing uses. The n is DATES; the show count is beside it because dates inside one run are not independent observations, and every bar here rests on between 80 and 173 shows. “National” is twelve titles from the Guardian to the Sun and they do not behave alike — the outlet table above ranks the ones with enough shows to rank, and the Evening Standard and the Independent sit at the top of it, not the papers with the most listings.

The three national titles with enough listings to split — Guardian 138 shows, The Times 61, Telegraph 61 — as a share of each group’s dates that sold out. The cells behind these nine numbers hold between 7 and 64 shows: the Guardian’s four-star cell is 64 shows and its five-star cell is 11, so read the shape of the table and not any single figure. Split the tier by masthead AND star and thirty-one cells appear, of which six hold twenty shows or more — which is why this is a caveat on the chart above and not a ranking of newspapers.

Breadth measured on shows with at least five past dates. Lead time is the median hours before curtain at which the live monitor caught the sellout, across sellouts it timed. Snapshot fringe-2026-08-19.db — this cut is not part of press-figures.json and has not been rerun at the season-final cutoff above, which also means it is unaffected by the closing-week sampling change described in the appendix: every date in it was observed on the ten-minute cadence.