News

How many people read the news paper every day?

State of the Newsmedia 2004

• People began to stop reading newspaper in the 1940s but the p[opulation kept growing, so newspapers kept growing. In 1990, the real numbers started to kick in and newspapers began a fast decline in circulation.
• newspaper reading in the United States peaked in 1970 with 62 million newspapers sold every day.4
• After 1970, People started to read the newspaper less and some stopped gettng it altogether
• "Today, just more than half of Americans (54 percent) read a newspaper during the week, somewhat more (62 percent) on Sundays, and the number is continuing to drop"
• About 55 million newspapers are sold each week day, and 59 million on Sunday.
• 
  For a while, bulk sales artificlally boosted readership numbers. These are papers not delivered to hoes or bought by individuals, but bought in bulk by hotels and airlines to give to guests and passengers. For example,  "46 percent of USA Today's circulation - 987,670 papers - comes from bulk sales."
• "The population shift away from urban to suburban America - and the problems that created for home delivery - helped erode the afternoon paper. The evening paper was a perfect match for the 1950s factory worker who came home at 4 p.m. to a stay-at-home mom and a nuclear family. But factory jobs have steadily given way to other forms of employment. Nuclear families are much less the norm. And, married or not, most moms themselves now work. Morning circulation first surpassed evening in 1982."
• It costs more to print the newspaper than it costs the reader to buy it. Newspapers make about 80 percent of their revenue from advertising, and only 20 percent from the purchase price.

Echo Media

• In the top 50 markets in the US:
•  79.9% of adults read a newspaper in a seven-day period
• 55.1% of adults read a daily newspaper every weekday, and 63.1% read one each Sunday
• 53% of women read the daily newspaper compared to 58% of men. 65% of women read the Sunday newspaper compared to 63% of men

Minhaz Merchant

• "Over the past few years there has been a precipitous 33 per cent fall in the circulation of American newspapers. "

Who reads newspapers?
State of the Newsmedia 2004:

• Young people don't read newspapers. Every age group except those over 65 have seen declinging readership.
• the "Age of Indifference" indicates young people in their 20s were not picking up the habit of reading the paper at the same rate as earlier generations,
• Anotehr bad sign is that 21st century readership is lowest among Asians and Hispanics--the country's two fastest-growing minority populations
• People with more education are more likely to read the newspaper, but declines in readership have been occurring at alleducation levels.

Echo Media:

• Education levels of newspapr readershp:
• Post graduate – 69%
• College graduate – 61%
• Some college (1-3 years) – 57%
• High School graduate – 53%
• Less than high school graduate – 36%

•  Average readership by household income for a daily newspaper?
• $75,000 or more – 64%
• $50,000 or more – 62%
• $40,000 or more – 60%
•  Less than $40,000 – 47%

What are the preferred ways of getting the news?

Minhaz Merchant:

•  "millions of (mainly young) people who are deserting newspapers in droves for online news sites. Among under-25s, who have literally grown up with a computer in their lap and the Internet a mouse click away, growing numbers simply don't read newspapers at all anymore. They get their primary news online, surf the net on community and social networking sites (myspace.com, orkut.com) and switch on television for entertainment in the evening. For American media companies, the most alarming trend is the fall in TV viewership: the Internet has hit major television networks almost as hard as it has hurt newspapers. "
• "No longer are readers willing to be lectured to by editorial writers. They want a conversation, not a monologue"

 
Is FOX really news?
" NO" says FAIR
According to POLITICO, the White House says, "No."


Who controls the media in the USA?
The Big Six

Common Cause says:

Viacom owns CBS; General Electric owns NBC; Disney owns ABC; and News Corporation owns Fox Broadcasting Company. ABC's corporate parent is the Walt Disney Company.


Disney owns 10 television stations, 50 radio stations, ESPN, A&E, the History Channel, Discover magazine, Hyperion publishing, Touchstone Pictures, and Miramax Film Corp. Viacom owns 39 television stations, 184 radio stations, The Movie Channel, BET, Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, VH1, Simon & Schuster publishing, Scribner, and Paramount Pictures. General Electric owns 13 television stations, CNBC, MSNBC, and Bravo. News Corp. owns 26 television stations, FX, Fox News Channel, TV Guide, the Weekly Standard, New York Post, DirecTV, the publisher HarperCollins, film production company Twentieth Century Fox and the social networking website MySpace.

Currently, six major companies control most of the media in our country. The FCC could decide to relax media ownership rules, which would allow further consolidation and put decisions about what kinds of programming and news Americans receive in even fewer hands.



 
Funny Stuff

Who Reads the Newspapers?

• The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
• The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
• The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country.
• USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie chart format.
• The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave LA to do it.
• The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
• The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
• The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
• The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are Democrats.
• The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
• The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.