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October 30, 2008, 02:31 PM ET
More Newspapers in Trouble
Yeah, young people are online, but do you think they’re really reading newspapers there?
In the comments on the previous entry on newspaper circulation, David Yamada mentioned an ominous sign of the times: The Christian Science Monitor’s decision to drop its daily print edition. The Monitor will only go to mailboxes as a weekly magazine, while the daily version will appear online. PC World terms it “the first of what could be a series of print newspaper closings,” noting that circulation had been dropping for years, and losses were accumulating. The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a box headlined “Era Ends at ‘Christian Science Monitor,’” and in it editor John Yemma explained, “The Christian Science Monitor recognizes that daily print has become too costly and energy-intensive. There’s still a role for print, but one that is geared to weekends, when people still can find time to catch up . . . and experience the pleasures of print.” The Journal added that advertising had been falling “as readers increasingly turn to the Web.”
Is that really the whole problem, though, that readers go to the Web for news, not to the newstand? There is an age factor here that I have seen few stories address. When we look at younger cohorts, we find that their daily consumption of print newspapers is far below the consumption of their parents 30 and 40 years ago. And the idea that teens and early-20-year-olds spend much time on the Web reading news stories is a fantasy. This is one of the major factors in the decline of newspapers — not the rise of the Web, but the rise of a generation that doesn’t care about current events and op-eds.
Here is one of the best stories on the problem, published in The Chronicle four years ago. So let’s stop attributing the decline of this essential civic institution entirely to the digital advent, and start including the dispositions of young adults in the mix.
The problem is going to get worse. Right next to the Monitor story in the Journal yesterday was a report that Gannett Co., the largest newspaper publisher in the country, was laying off 10 percent of its local newspaper division. This comes on top of a 3 percent cut last summer.
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