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August 18, 2008

More bad news for newspapers

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press conducts survey research on newspaper reading habits every two years, and the latest results, released Sunday afternoon, reveal more bad news for the daily press.

"This year for the first time in roughly 15 years of asking the question, fewer than half of all Americans report reading a daily newspaper on a regular basis. Only 46% say they read the paper regularly - this number is down from 52% in 2006 and was as high as 71% in 1992. In a similar vein, fewer now report having read a newspaper 'yesterday,' a more reliable measure of newspaper readership. Only 34% say they read a newspaper yesterday, down from 40% in 2006.

"The falloff in readership over the past two years has occurred across the board -- men and women, whites and blacks, college graduates and those who never attended college are all reading the newspaper at lower rates than in 2006. Age continues to be strongly correlated with newspaper readership....Currently, only 15% of those younger than 25 report having read a newspaper yesterday. Among those ages 25 to 34, 24% read a newspaper yesterday. This compares with roughly half (46%) of those 50 and older."

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher (a newspaper trade publication), points to a key finding:

"...while more young people are indeed reading newspapers online, their total readership, print and Web combined, has not grown in two years."

So in a period of rapid population growth, newspapers as a whole are holding their readership roughly constant, but substituting free readers on the internet, where advertising revenue is small, for paid readers in print, where advertising revenues are much larger.

This is a recipe for disaster. Meanwhile, internet journals like American Thinker continue to grow rapidly. (Our readership has considerably more than doubled in the last two years.)

Hat tip: David Paulin

Posted at 10:06 AM | Email | | | Share Share
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