Newspaper circulation has been on the decline for years, and now so is advertising, but one thing that’s remained quite steady even amidst all the turmoil is reader engagement.
A new study from Northwestern University’s Readership Institute finds that although newspaper readership has declined a bit since the last survey in 2006, the time readers spend with the medium remains steady.
And while readership among the younger crowd, those ages 18-24, is slowly falling, it is still stable among those over 45.
“I'm tired of reading nonsense about readership flight from newspapers,” RI managing director Mary Nesbitt tells Media Life.
“It is indisputably true that the habit of reading a newspaper every single day has been on a decades-long decline, but it is not a plunge into the abyss. It has been a gradual decline to date, driven by people reading less frequently but not abandoning newspapers.”
RI found that readers engage with newspapers on average more than five days per week. They read 60 percent of the daily paper on weekdays and 62 percent on Sundays, and those numbers have remained stable since the biannual survey began in 2002.
Readers continue to spend about 27 minutes per day with the papers on weekdays, the same amount of time as in the first year of the study. They spend 57 minutes on Sundays, a number that has declined a bit over the years.
“I think it's really important that media buyers and planners--and the rest of us--don't fall victim to the popular wisdom about ‘old media,’” Nesbitt says.
“And it's important to pay attention to what newspaper readers are actually doing and the experiences that they have when they're doing it. Newspapers truly engage a large percentage of the population on a regular basis.”
The study surveyed 3,000 adults across 100 newspaper markets in March and April of 2008. It generated a reader behavior score (RBS) that measures how often a person reads a daily or Sunday newspaper, how much time they spend with it, and how completely they read it.
That was then indexed on a scale of 1 to 7--1 being a person who does not read the paper at all and 7 being a reader who is highly engaged across all three measures.
This year’s respondents, including newspaper readers and nonreaders, averaged a 3.38, down slightly from a 3.55 in fall 2006. Among newspaper readers only, however, the score was higher, a 4.7, up from 4.61 in 2006 and the highest level yet recorded in the survey.
Among readers 18-24, the RBS slipped to 2.4, from 2.84 in 2006. Among those over 65, the RBS hit an all-time high of 4.52.
That trend could mean trouble for newspapers down the road, but it’s nothing to panic over now, says Nesbitt.
“There is another trend at work, that upcoming generations are far less likely to become newspaper readers at all,” Nesbitt says.
“At some point, when the ‘best’ readers die, and succeeding generations lack a strong newspaper-reading habit, overall decline will accelerate. We're not at that point.”
Another surprise is that, despite the growing numbers for online newspaper web sites, many local readers still are not logging on.
Sixty-two percent of respondents said they had never visited their local paper’s site. Only 14 percent had done so in the past seven to 30 days, and that number has gone up only slightly the past five years.
