[p2p-research] Slashdot News Story | Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates

[Paul D. Fernhout]

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2131236/Decline-In-US-Newspaper-Readership-Accelerates
"The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its 
lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 
percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with 
a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in 
readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies 
on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. "Newspapers 
have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination," says 
Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now 
consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to 
Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily 
newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. "Publishers who think their 
businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons 
they can deliver probably will see their businesses die," writes Mutter. 
"The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it’s 
not already too late." Almost without exception, the papers that lost the 
least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily 
newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on 
highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and 
have a lock on local ad markets."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603272.html
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/newspapers-mass-less-mass-medium.html
http://www.leader-vindicator.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20382685&BRD=2758&PAG=461&dept_id=572980&rfi=6

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/