The Changing Face of Media: Where Do We Get Our News?

How often do you read a newspaper? How often do you look at the website of a newspaper? What about news sites linked with television stations, or news sites that are independent of other forms of media? The way people get their news has been changing ever since the growth of the Internet. In fact, an article from the Wall Street Journal indicates that some papers have lost as much as 13% of their readership in one year (2004) with most papers losing between one and three percent for the year. Those declines still continue until today. Mainstream news sources have been losing ground against websites that allow access, whenever the reader wants it, often without the reader needing to pay for a paper subscription. Furthermore, by accessing news online, readers can go straight to news they want, unlike with television news, and does not need to cast several unwanted pages, as what they would experience with print papers. Whether a survey reports that readership is up or down, the information on readership can be confusing. One has to be careful of what reasons behind a particular surveys are, and how the readership is measured. Newspaper companies have an interest in making it seems that they still attract plenty of readers, in order for them to attract plenty of advertisers.
But the statistics you get may depend on where you are looking. A PEW Research Center survey, for example, points out that since 2000, readership for online sources have been on decline, at least for mainstream news sources. The survey indicates that most people who use online mainstream sources use it in addition to their daily papers. For example, a person with a newspaper subscription may be interested in a particular story, and then go online looking for stories that are tied to it, or for additional information that the newspaper might offer. So online readership may or may not be increasing, or may simply be part of the same audience for the print form of newspaper.

An article in USA Today, though claims that online readership went up by nearly a third in 2006. That article was taken from a survey by the Newspaper Association of America, an organization that may have an interest in supporting the view that plenty of people are still consuming both print newspapers and online newspapers. That is, the NAA wants to support its members by suggesting there is still a huge newspaper audience in print and online, to encourage more advertisers to spend more money with the newspaper companies. Furthermore, some of the statistics are questionable. For instance, The Washington Times measures total readership using the "average weekly print audience and the net 30-day website audience". In other words, the readership for the print version is calculated based on estimates, and then the traffic to the website is measured by how many times people visit the site, not necessarily how many unique visitors use the site. An article at Editor and Publisher claims that "If you count Web traffic, newspapers are actually more popular than ever." This is in an article about the metrics used to determine readership of newspapers. That is, for years, newspapers have used a measurement of readership that suggests that for each newspaper purchased, several people will actually read it, as it is passed along. This metric, however, was never really backed up with clear, legitimate data. So newspapers companies are trying to devise new ways of figuring out how many people are reading newspapers, either the print version, or the online version. This can be tricky, as many of the people who use particular news websites may be consumers of the print paper as well. In other words, "hits" on a web site may or may not be unique users, which is important to advertisers.

Beyond the advertising money, some suggest that there is much more at stake with the decline in readership of newspapers. For example, the Readership Institute indicates that in addition to the decline of readers of newspapers, there has been a decline in "social capital" or the involvements that people have in their local communities. For example, author Robert Putnam indicates that membership in local PTAs and even in local bowling leagues has declined as well. The connection between newspapers and these other elements of society, according to Putnam, is that they signal that people are more absorbed in their own concerns, and less involved in their communities in ways that would put them in frequent contact with their neighbors for common causes. Newspapers, because they were traditionally community based, could have an impact on how involved people are with their communities in this view.
Whatever view one takes, the indication is that newspaper readership for print edition is declining. It takes some clever manipulation of statistics and surveys to suggest otherwise, or to suggest that readers have moved directly from print newspapers to the websites of those newspapers. People have so many ways to get news these days, whether it is in print, over the radio, television, or Internet, there is no clear way to measure exactly where news is being consumed and by who, and to what effect. Sorting this issue will likely take many years, and see more people shifting their news selections about in very personal ways.