Friday, March 28, 2008

Whither Newspapers?

This morning, I attended a breakfast/informational session sponsored by NewsBank, vendor of our online subscription to the Sacramento Bee and other California newspapers. Here are some interesting statistics from Ken Doctor, former journalist and managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who spoke about the "Changing Face of Content":
  • 56 - average age of those who read newspapers in print

  • 60 - average age of those who watch broadcast TV news

  • 40 - average age of those who primarily use newspapers' web sites

  • Yahoo! News - #1 Internet news site

Some surprising factoids:

  • Americans read the news about 62 minutes per day. This has not changed over the last five years; what has changed is that more Americans are reading the news online now.

  • 50% of Americans get their news at the GYM (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) daily; 25% more than once a day.

  • 10% of news content is now blogs.

  • 60% of broadband video is news footage. Reuters and AP make 1,000 new videos per month!

His conclusions: news and blogs may become indistinguishable, as television news and newspapers post additional information - much of it surprisingly comprehensive - and news stories on their blogs, and then the blog posts are, in turn, republished in print. This then leads to a few questions that have still to be answered: What is the newspaper of record? Print? Online? Are reader comments included?

What do you think? How do you get your news fix?

1 comment:

PeonInChief said...

What it probably means is that newspapers will probably become summaries (more like USA Today) and people will go to the Web for more detailed information through the newspaper website, or to find other sources. It also means that more people will read only the news they're really interested in, and won't read as much on topics outside their "interests."