I long thought that newspapers were dead, so imagine my surprise when I read that 69% of the US population still reads the newspaper
Of course the way people read the paper has changed:
Print remains the most popular format, with 81 percent reading that format. Half of the respondents – 51 percent – read print only. The other half read the newspaper on one of the digital platforms.
Nearly a third – 30 percent – use both print and digital.
The percentage of people that still read the newspaper AND the number that still read print copies surprises me.
The Newspaper is basically dead here in Detroit….with a Joint Operating Agreement approved by the court back in 1989.
Before the JOA we had two very different newspapers. Since the JOA went into effect this has changed to make both papers a minimal “newspaper” if you want to call their products that. The papers were more destroyed in Detroit as a result of a strike that neither paper ever recovered from in the mid 1990s.
I grabbed a copy of the Detroit Free Press the other day and was reminded by how bad the paper had gotten. It is about a quarter as thick as it once was and the quality of the paper has greatly suffered. The more conservative paper in town, The Detroit News, has held up a little better, as long as you don’t mind the conservative bend to the paper.
But I guess Detroit is in the minority as far as newspapers go, and this has colored my outlook over the whole industry.
So… do you still read a Newspaper?