Happy Newz Year!
Newspapers and the New Year
This is my 7th post. Hopefully it’ll bring some luck with it, because as we stare down the barrel of 2009 the newspaper industry (where I make my living) is in sore need of some luck, or some better ideas, a better economy, and a government and society that better understands, or perhaps just better appreciates, the absolute necessity of the survival of newspapers.
OK, maybe not news PAPERS per se in this ever-transmogrifying digital age, but reliable, well-researched and well-sourced, thoughtful, fair, incisive NEWS STORIES, be they on paper, or a desktop computer, laptop, BlackBerry, mobile phone, iPod, or Kindle screen.
There are confusing studies, surveys and statistics flying around out there, including that people aren’t reading as much as they used to. Some say that newspaper readership has dropped by huge numbers, others that readership has not dropped by huge numbers but the perception is out there that is has, driving a loss in advertising revenues.
In a recent study on literacy and newspaper readership (“America’s Most Literate Cities“), Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, found conventional wisdom about readership to often be wrong:
“In addition to the rankings for 2008, I also examined two critical concerns. First, a point commonly made about the decline of newspaper circulationis that it is caused by the rise of reading newspapers online. The conventional wisdom here is similar to the claims about the decline in bookstores: it’s caused by the rise in online book buying. And that is the same conventional wisdom that, pre-internet, claimed that library use and support of bookstores were mutually incompatible. More free book sources would be associated with fewer bookstores. And in all cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong. As the data for this and previous surveys indicates, cities ranked highly for having better-used libraries also have more booksellers; cities with more booksellers also have a higher proportion of people buying books online; and cities with newspapers with high per capita circulation rates also have a high proportion of people reading newspapers online. Cities that rank highly in one form of literate behavior are likely to rank highly in the other forms and practices of literacy. A literate society tends to practice many forms of literacy not just one or another.”
Although that information bodes well for newspapers, Miller found (for an upcoming study on international literacy) that U.S. newspaper readership lags behind many countries of the world
“While it is too early in this study to draw conclusions, it is nevertheless striking that newspaper readership rates in the US’s global economic competitors are significantly higher than in the US. Since literacy is generally regarded as a barometer of a nation’s social, cultural, and economic health, perhaps these findings are cause for national concern.”
So, it seems the news is mixed, while online sources are not necessarily diminishing readership, we are losing ground compared to newspaper readership in other parts of the world.
As I helped my very-digitally-literate mother learn how to download e-audio books from the local public library to the MP3 player I got her for Xmas (the first in the family), it occurred to me that was a great example of how our ways of reading are changing. That it’s not always that we’re reading less, but that we are reading differently.
And this is, it seems to me, what the newspaper industry and advertisers need to fully grasp, embrace, nurture, encourage and make absolutely accessible – news, information, the written word, and the unabridged spoken word (I’m not talking streaming video snippets here), delivered wherever and whenever we want it. With depth and clarity and meaning.
Will we pay for it? I think people will always pay for well-written, solid national and international news coverage. We just have to figure out, perhaps let go of (and I’m one of those who doesn’t want to let go), the idea that the word inked on newsprint as sacrosanct.
As long as we’re reading, who cares what we’re reading it on.
Miller’s Top Ten (the first and last seem to be ties) Literate Cities:
- Minneapolis, Minn. 1.5
- Seattle, Wash. 1.5
- Washington, DC 3
- St Paul, Minn. 4
- San Francisco, Calif. 5
- Atlanta, Ga. 6
- Denver, Colo. 7
- Boston, MA 8
- St Louis, Mo. 9
- Cincinnati, Ohio 10.5
- Portland, Ore. 10.5
~ Chow for Now! ~
