Not all newspaper readers are created equally

In fact, last year print subscribers in the US were worth $709 per person, while online readers were worth $46 each (source Columbia Journalism Review, via Thoughts of Nigel). If you look at print readers (as opposed to paying subscribers), the total is $470 per person – still 10x more than online.

Again, this is something I talked about in the last post linking into something that Peter Preston wrote about in yesterday’s Observer: That outside a community of news nerds like myself, most people treat online news as a commodity. They find what they want and leave rather than linger to read the whole paper.

Ryan Chittun of CJR concludes: “Spin that how you want. Either newspapers have done a poor job of addicting more online readers to their offerings or their hardcore readers are still predominantly reading the print paper.”

Or rather, perhaps said news nerds are doing both. We read the news online, but we’ve never abandoned print completely, unlike more casual news consumers.