I downloaded and have been poking around in the latest Scarborough Research Newspaper Audience report and there are some interesting numbers there.
The reports seem to be pretty broad-based: newspaper readers are those in the newspaper’s market area who have “read or looked into” the daily or Sunday edition of the paper during the past seven days; internet readership adults in the local market who visited the newspaper’s website(s) during the past seven days. Totals are expressed as a percentage of the total adult population in the market area.
It’s not surprising that few of the newspapers crack 50 per cent, either for the newspaper alone or when the newspaper and web site figures are aggregated. Even among the strong newspapers in single-daily cities, no paper got any higher than two-thirds of the adults.
What is surprising is that only a handful of the newspapers registered more than single digit percentages when it came to local web site visits. A few went to double digits (such as the Washington Post at 21 per cent and the Boston Globe at 17 per cent). But the Dallas Morning News audience was seven per cent, the innovative Tampa Tribune was 10 per cent. And, in most cases, there seems to be considerable overlap between those reading the print and the pixels.
What does it all mean? Don’t know. Maybe the local newspapers are good enough that those seeking the news are satisfied with print and see no need to go online. Maybe it is that, in many of the markets, there’s nothing of added value on the web to draw readers. Or maybe it’s that what newspapers are doing on the web — all those wonderfully adventurous and inventive storytelling — is running ahead of where the reader is at the moment.
Anyone smarter than me about these things (and that is a large number) can feel free to chime in.
Related: The latest circulation news, passed along by Jim Romenesko, carries the headline Daily circ for six months ending in March drops about 2.5%. That’s about the same as this time last year and, if memory serves, the year before. While some newspapers have gained readers, a few others have circulation drops of five per cent or more.
TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, READERSHIP, ONLINE
