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?

NyTimes.com Becomes Entirely Open

An O'Reilly Radar blog post reported yesterday that the New York Times has announced it will stop charging for access to parts of its web site, beginning today. The Times is also making available its archives from 1851-1922 and from 1987 to the present. (There will still be charges for some material from 1923-1986.) The publishers explain more in a "Letter to Readers."

This is great news for library users! The New York Times is one of the most useful sources for reading about historical and contemporary events. Now that the archives are available online for free, students, historians, genealogists, you (!) can use this remarkable resource anywhere you have Internet access.

So, what's the catch? You still need to register (free) at NYT in order to read the articles. But with your account, you can read, print, e-mail, or blog them. For free!

Civil War coverage, anyone? (Hint: select the archive from 1851-1986 and use the "advanced" search to limit the dates to 1860-1864.) Check it out!