All Posts Tagged With: "Desert"

Good and Bad News for U. S. Newspaper - Great news for Asia

Newspaper readers are not deserting at anywhere near the rate of advertisers says the latest edition of the Readership Institute (RI) tracking study among 3,000 readers of 100 newspapers.

The Institute observes that as newspaper staffs contract it’s a challenge, to say the least, for a smaller staff to produce, sell and deliver a high-quality local news. Newspaper readers spend, on average, 27 minutes with the daily paper, little changed in the last six years. Readers spend 57 minutes with the Sunday paper, but that figure “has been slowly dropping” since 2002.

The bad news is that 62% of respondents said they had never gone to their local paper’s Web site — and just 14% said they had visited between the last seven to 30 days. RI’s Site Usage Measurement (SUM) score — measuring the frequency and duration of visits — has changed little for newspapers over the years, and is a “feeble” 1.26 on a scale of 1 to 7. A Neilsen Survey of US Newspaper websites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 — a record, and a 12 percent increase on a year ago, according to Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site.

U. S. newspaper circulation is down 30% since 1985. Seven of the 10 best-selling daily newspapers are in Asia, which also has the three largest markets: China, India, and Japan