Reading Habits | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

March 15, 2004

Beyond the numbers, it is also helpful to examine reading habits to understand what was driving people away from newspapers, and why it accelerated after 1990. Part of the explanation, of course, is that lifestyle and technological changes altered the news business. 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. By 2002, there were nearly five and half morning newspapers sold for each evening newspaper.¹⁴

Number of U.S. Daily Newspapers

Weekday and Sunday editions, 5-year increments, 1940 to 2000

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Editor and Publisher Yearbook data

But as those shifts were occurring, the newspaper industry also made choices that had important and likely negative consequences on readership and circulation. Newspapers make roughly 80 percent of their revenue from advertising, and only 20 percent from circulation.¹⁵ Indeed, it costs most papers more to print each paper than they actually sell it for, but higher sales allow the papers to charge higher advertising rates. Influenced in part by advertisers who increasingly wanted to focus exclusively on people who were likely to buy a lot of goods, newspaper companies in the 1970s and 1980s decided to chase demographics rather than readers. Around the same time, many newspapers also began embarking on pricing strategies that further made the newspaper even more forbidding to less affluent audiences.

That shift toward elite audiences dictated where the circulation declines occurred. By and large, when the afternoon papers that appealed more to working class readers died, those readers stopped reading newspapers.

People can debate which came first - the disappearance of middle-class audiences or the pricing and coverage strategies that made newspapers even less appealing to those audiences. Whichever, they reinforced each other. In the short run, that may have made economic sense. Why add readers who advertisers are not interested in, when the cost of producing and delivering additional newspapers does not pay for itself without new advertising dollars to underwrite it?

But in the long run, as the circulation numbers suggest, the strategy raises questions. As the children of these lost readers become more affluent and influential, can it be assumed that they will just gravitate to a newspaper no matter what? And how can a publisher grow a business in the long-term if it is not growing its audience?