88% of newspaper reading time is in print

A constant conversation I have both with clients and colleagues could be paraphrased a little like this: “You can’t seriously tell me that we need to put all our efforts online. The fact is people still read newspapers.”

My response: I completely agree. Though we’re in a transition phase and the trends all point one way, print media is still enormously influential. It’s not a case of either / or but and / and.

That point is reinforced by a useful reality check from Columbia Journalism Review, which comments that for those of us within the bubble:

“It’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They still actually pick up the newspaper and read it.”

CJR’s Ryan Chittum came up with a stat where he took major US newspapers and figured out the time spent reading online versus time spent reading print.

Looking at the top five American newspaper websites (New York Times, LA Times USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post) Ryan worked out that the proportion of online reading time is 12% online / 88% print – the imbalance is apparently even greater if you assume more than one person reads each paper.

His conclusion? That “fifteen years into the age of the online newspaper”, things are “still disproportionately stacked towards print.”

Some important caveats

Well yes, I agree but I’d add also some ‘buts’ into that. Namely:

1 – I would argue that it takes us longer to read print than it does online. And the way we consume each is very different.

When we buy a print newspaper, we read the newspaper (or at least I do). When we read something in an online paper, we read the article.

That’s a crucial difference. For the latter we’ve often been directed there by a Twitter message, a search result, a specific RSS feed for that newspaper section and so on. We get what we want, and we move on.

2 – In terms of raw audience numbers, the figures are unambiguous.

Many more people read an online paper than a print one. In the UK, this is particularly pronounced for broadsheets. For The Guardian for example, the latest ABCe figures show that the online edition has an audience 9x larger than the print one.

3 – It would be interesting to see this stat broken down by age groups.

Take away people like myself who grew up in a paper world, and look at Generation Y / Z only and I suspect the results would look very different.

Image – Sid