This week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released figures for newspaper circulation for the last six months, and it’s a bleak picture. (See this story in Wall Street Journal.) Here are numbers for major dailies:
USA Today -7.5%
Wall Street Journal +0.6%
New York Times -3.5%
L.A. Times -6.6%
Washington Post -1.2%
New York Daily News -14.3%
New York Post -20.5%
Chicago Tribune -7.5%
Houston Chronicle -14.0%
Arizona Republic -5.7%
One of the consequences of the drop is reductions in newsroom staff, such as what happened yesterday at the Baltimore Sun, where 61 people were laid off (see here).
Part of the declines are due to newspapers responding to the financial crisis by reducing their geographical reach (for instance, not distributing newspapers to rural areas) and dropping discounted subscriptions. Another part comes from readers turning to the Web for news, not to daily delivery of print versions. (It is worth noting that the only major daily that enjoyed a rise, The Wall Street Journal, charges for much of its online content.)
Another part of the decline, however, receives little notice in discussions of dropping circulation. It’s a cohort decline: Young people don’t read newspapers at the rate of older people.
As David Mindich reported here at The Chronicle a few years ago in an article entitled, “Dude, Where’s Your Newspaper?”:
“In 1972, 46 percent of college-age Americans read a newspaper every day. Today it’s only 21 percent, according to research by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s General Social Survey.”
And for those people who think that young people follow the news as much as older folks did when they were young, only they do it through Web portals, Mindich adds:
“While many point to new media as the best hope for rekindling interest in news, only 11 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds list news as a major reason for logging on. The Internet is a great source of news for some, but for most it is a great way of avoiding the news, to be used for e-mail, instant messages, and other personal information.”
If we believe that the newspaper is a fundamental institution of civic engagement and a healthy democracy, colleges should envision the resurrection of newspaper reading as an element of their civic mission. Many colleges and universities have created civic engagement units of their own, and perhaps they should consider a subscription initiative for all entering students.
