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Newspapers forsake Baby Boomers
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No more print for Monitor
A trade publication wonders in an article whether newspapers are forsaking Baby Boomers as they try to stay afloat in a sea of red ink.
Editor & Publisher magazine, which is widely circulated among newspaper professionals, posits the question in its cover story -- "Are newspapers forgetting (its) most loyal readers?" -- by shrinking the number of pages and sections, shrinking the actual size of the paper, and redesigning the pages to, supposedly, make them more appealing to a younger, less attentive audience.
The magazine cites an August report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that shows the percentage of those who say they had read a newspaper on a given day has dropped from 50 percent in 1998 to 34 percent in 2008.At the same time, according to the article, those who have gone to the Web for news at least three days per week jumped from 13 to 37 percent.
But Baby Boomers and older readers still dominate that newspaper audience:
-- 31 percent of those between 35 and 49 read a paper daily,
-- 40 percent of those between 50 and 64
-- 55 percent of those 65 and older.
Only 15 percent of respondents under 25 were among the daily newspaper readers, according to the story, yet newspapers have tried hard to lure those readers to their pages.
"The daily newspaper is primarily a boomer product," Kate Marymont, vice president for Information Center content at Gannett, told E&P. Gannett publishes several community newspapers, as well as USA Today, the largest daily circulation newspaper in the country.
We've examined newspapers in this space a couple of times -- here and here -- in the context of the shift of news to electronic readers, such as Amazon's Kindle, that replace ink on paper with so-called e-ink.
Printed newspapers continue to face a troubling and continuing decline in circulation and advertising revenue. Overall readership is up, thanks to the shift of content and readers to the web, but online revenue is not earning publishers what print revenue did at one time.
In a sign of possible things to come, The Christian Science Monitor is the first largescale publication to say it will stop printing a daily newspaper, deciding instead to publish on the web and print a once a week digest.
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