Newspapers still attracting some audiences

In light of the class discussion about the premature claims of the death of newspapers, a new study done for the newspaper industry by Scarborough Research emphasizes the quality (rather than quantity) of newspaper readers.  Highlighted findings include

• 71% of adults have read a newspaper or visited a newspaper website in the previous week
• Newspapers reach highly educated readers (85% of adults with post-graduate education read newspapers or visit newpaper websites)
• Newspapers reach women professionals and managers (81% of women in professions or in managerial positions with incomes over $100K)
• Certain shoppers have high readership levels (those who spend over $500 on jewelry, women's clothes, and women's shoes, for instance)

Another study, from ComScore, provides further details on visitors to newspaper websites, also touts high readership levels (visits).

• Over 60% of all adult Internet users visited newspaper websites last quarter
• Around 73% of individuals making over $100K a year visit newspaper websites
• Newspaper websites average 4.1 billion page views a month, spending nearly 3.4 billion minutes

There's two ways of looking at this - first, that as the newspaper trade group concluded, newspaper readers and visitors to newspaper websites are audiences that advertisers value; alternatively, you can interpret the need to identify fairly narrowly defined demographic groups (professional women making $100K who shop at Macy's) over an extended time frame (in previous week or month, depending on the statistic) to find high readership levels as suggesting that the overall daily readership levels aren't that great.

Scarborough Report press release
ComScore Report press release