By Cynthia Linton and Hazel Reinhardt

For many decades, readership studies have shown older people reading daily newspapers more than the young. It was assumed that as people aged, and took on responsibilities of families, jobs and homes, they would begin to read newspapers – just like their parents. So when the huge Baby Boom generation came along, newspaper companies eagerly awaited their coming of age. But what they expected didn't happen. This generation did not begin reading more once they reached their 30s.

Thus came the realization among researchers that it was the year they were born, not the stage of life, that determined how often people read a daily newspaper. This was confirmed by a new way of studying readership – cohort analysis – which measured each new age group or cohort at a young age and then followed it through the life cycle.

Researchers also showed that each new generation was starting out reading newspapers less than the cohort before, and then staying at about the same level, causing a continual drop-off in daily newspaper readership. Projecting that trend, some warn that daily readership is in danger of becoming obsolete when the Baby Boomers die.

The decline had long been obscured by both an overall increase in population (so the numbers didn't fall as fast as the percentages did) and the continued participation in the readership pool of older, high-readership generations. While studies that measured readership at one point in time seemed to suggest that people were reading more as they aged, in fact they were reading more if they were born earlier.

People don't pick up the newspaper habit as they mature and take on responsibilities in life. Rather it is a habit picked up (or not) early in life. And it is being picked up less and less by each successive generation. In fact, the daily newspaper habit has dropped 25 percent in 40 years, according to Stuart B. Tolley of Tolley Associates.

If present trends continue, by 2010 only 9 percent of people in their 20s will be reading a newspaper every day, according to John Bartolomeo, managing partner of Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo. This figure compares with 22 percent in 1998 and 46 percent back in 1972. Readership patterns are established by age 30, Bartolomeo says, and others have agreed, though some say they're set even earlier.

So, what is happening with each new generation to make it read newspapers less? Many point to television as the main culprit. The timing fits. In addition to television, there has been a proliferation of other new and diversified media, including niche magazines, video games, DVDs, and now the Internet.

Generations that grew up with television, which burst on the scene in the ‘50s, read newspapers less, and parents who grew up themselves with television are more comfortable with this pattern. These parents are less likely to have newspapers in their homes, which is an important factor in establishing the newspaper habit for teenagers.

Concurrent with the drop in newspaper reading is a decline in civic involvement and voting, says Robert Putnam in “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America.” Since the ‘50s, people are watching TV more and reading newspapers less, he found. They are also less engaged in society and the political process.

The young are the first to adapt to any new method of communication, said Philip Meyer in “The Newspaper Survival Handbook.” They don't have an established newspaper habit, like older people do. And some researchers suggest that they have a tendency to want to take a new medium and make it their own.

Since the Internet became so popular in the ‘90s, the decline in newspaper readership is accelerating, according to Earl Wilkinson in “Confronting the Newspaper Youth Readership Puzzle.”

A drop in frequency of readership is the main problem, according to Tolley. The daily newspaper habit is on the way out, he suggests, although occasional readership continues.

Wilkinson agrees. The problem “is more of an issue of reading frequency than non-readership among young people,” he says. But Wilkinson predicts that if the decline in daily readership isn't reversed it will lead to the end of daily readership by the late 21st century.”

The Pioneering Cohort Study
In 1985, Philip Meyer was the first to apply age cohort analysis to newspaper readership.

Using data from 10 studies by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, where subjects gave their date of birth, Meyer looked at daily readership habits of successive cohorts between the ages of 20-25, and found a drop-off of 28 percent over a 20-year period. For each date studied, he found that the oldest age cohort was most likely to read a newspaper every day and the youngest cohort was least likely to do so.

When he analyzed the behavior of each cohort over time, between 1967 and 1983, he found little if any increase in readership as they grew older.

At the same time, Meyer looked at NORC data about “yesterday” readership. Again he found a significant drop-off with each successive cohort over 20 years, but less of a drop, 14 percent versus 28 percent. So the decline was half as bad for occasional readership as it was for everyday readership. He also found that as groups aged, not only did readership fail to increase but it even dropped a little.

Meyer concluded in 1985 that as new media emerge on the scene, younger people adapt to it most quickly. Gradually others in the population will follow suit, until virtually all are affected. This had occurred with TV and was about to happen with the Internet. And because people have limited time, the proliferation of new media “tend to squeeze out old media,” he said.

His dark predictions of a continuing downward trend were disbelieved by many at the time, but when they were borne out over time, it turned many media executives into believers.

The Impact of Television
In 1950, only 10 percent of homes had television sets, but by 1959, 90 percent did, according to Putnam. Each new generation started out at a higher level of television usage, Putnam says, and by 1995 household TV use was half again as high than it had been in the ‘50s. He estimated that television takes up at least 40 percent of the average person's leisure time. This was found to have a negative correlation with newspaper use.

Wolfram Peiser of Germany, studying “Cohort Trends in Media Use in the United States,” came to the same conclusion in 2000. “There appears to be evidence of a displacement of newspaper reading by television viewing at the cohort level,” he said, “Younger cohorts not only show higher levels of television viewing and a more favorable attitude toward television, but they also tend to read newspapers less regularly than older cohorts.”

The Impact of the Internet
Since 1996, the Internet appears to have had a powerful impact on newspaper readership, according to Earl Wilkinson in “Confronting the Newspaper Youth Readership Puzzle.”

“A new youth-driven culture of how information is acquired and processed has quickly developed around the Internet,” he says.

The decline in youth readership of newspapers seems to have accelerated in the late ‘90s. Wilkinson notes that Scarborough Research showed average weekday readership among 18- to 24-year-olds dropped from 45 percent in 1996 to 39 percent in 2001, while Sunday readership declined from 57 percent to 49 percent.

The National Newspaper Association Media Usage Study of 2000 also found a decline. In the same age group, regular newspaper readership dropped from 33 percent in 1997 to 24 percent in 2000. During the same time period, in the same age group, use of the Internet for news rose from 7 percent to 23 percent. Internet use also seems to have cut into TV news viewership, which showed a decline from 44 percent to 36 percent in the three-year period.

An International Phenomenon
Paid newspaper circulation in the highly educated, Western industrial countries has generally declined since the 1960s, Wilkinson reports. He cited several studies, including one by Ouest-France that shows everyday readership among 15- to 24-year-olds at 44 percent in 1978 and only 20 percent in 1997. Once-a-week reading dropped from 81 percent to 68 percent in the same period. In high-readership Norway, the percent of 16- to 24-year-olds reading “yesterday” dropped from 90 percent in 1996 to 75 percent in 2000, as reported by MMI of Gallup, Wilkinson says.

What Newspapers are Losing by This Defection
While long-range predictions are gloomy, newspapers are still making money and circulation numbers are dropping very slowly. Yet something is being lost even now, and has been in recent decades. If each new generation continued to read newspapers at the same level, the industry would have gained tens of billions of dollars from additional circulation and advertising revenue, Tolley argues in “Changing Readership, What are the Implications,” presented at Newspapers 2000 in San Francisco.

Sources
Nancy M. Davis, “Born to Read,” Presstime Magazine, NAA Summer Conferences, 2002.

Philip Meyer, “The Newspaper Survival Book,” Indiana University Press, 1985.

Wolfram Peiser, “Cohort Trends in Media Use in the United States,” Mass Communication & Society, 2000.

Robert D. Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect, No. 24, winter 1996.

B. Stuart Tolley, “Deconstructing the Fall of Daily Newspaper Readership,” delivered at Newspapers 2000, the NAA Research Conference, San Francisco, June 2000.

B. Stuart Tolley, “The Abyss That Is Destroying Daily Newspaper Reading,” on National Newspaper Association Web site, NAA.org.

Earl Wilkinson, “Confronting the Newspaper Youth Readership Puzzle,” International Newspaper Marketing Association special report, 2002.

Emory Woodard, IV, with Natalia Gridina, “Media in the Home 2000,” The Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2000.