By Bill Collins, Principal
Delivering the Courier-Express (Buffalo’s long-dead morning newspaper) was my first job outside my home. I offer the “outside my home” qualifier because I did get a weekly allowance for emptying the family dishwasher every morning, 7/365, and no slight task in a house of eight people.
Anyway, I could be described as many things as a kid (think red-headed, freckle-faced hellion, for starters) but high on my list would be the label, voracious newspaper reader. My siblings and I were bred to read the two newspapers that were delivered daily to our house and we actually would fight over sections on Sunday mornings. My persnickety desire to read the newspaper from front to back, section-by-section before anyone else could touch it didn’t endear me to my brothers and sisters.
So, it was natural that I be the first in the house to have a newspaper route. I’ve always said the morning newspaper route made men out of boys (sorry, girls didn’t have paper routes back then) and no surprise that the daily papers today are delivered by adults driving cars in pre-dawn darkness. I still don’t know where I got the intestinal fortitude at the age of 12 to be up every morning of the year at 5:45 a.m. to deliver the route, and then off to school and oftentimes in the worst weather (an occupational hazard in Buffalo, you know). Being on time was always a challenge but I didn’t particularly care that the high powered businessmen on my route wanted the paper early.
The struggle against the clock was made worse by my habit, especially in the summer, of sitting on our front steps reading the morning edition while precious minutes ticked away. I had to know what was going on in the world and how my beloved St. Louis Cardinals and my hero, pitcher Bob Gibson, had done the night before. Have you met any 12-year-old kids recently who make a habit of reading two newspapers a day??
That was then…and this is now. Which leads me, finally, to the point of this ramble and that is how newspaper readership continues, sadly, to decline. Just published, the Adweek Media/Harris Poll’s latest study of 2,136 U.S. adults revealed that just 43 percent of Americans read a newspaper online or in print almost every day and that number dips to less than 25 percent in the 18-34 category. The era of Americans reading a newspaper every day is slowly but surely coming to an end.
The survey confirms what we all know to be true: that the older the person, the more likely he or she is to be a regular newspaper reader. While two-thirds of the 55+ category reads a paper every day, that number gradually declines to the point that almost 20 percent of 18-34’s never read a newspaper in any form.
If you’re a newspaper publisher or editor, even more worrisome is the finding that 77 percent of adults who use the internet say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a newspaper’s content online. Some (19 percent) are willing to pay but only between $1 and $10 a month. This shoots a hole in the idea that newspapers eventually would make up the money they are losing on hard-copy circulation to online subscriptions.
What are they going to do? Someone has to pay for the collection and processing of news and it clearly can’t be done on the basis of advertising. Troubling times indeed.
