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Newspapers' Future is Online

Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: By the end of 2005, 50 million Americans got news online on a typical day, a sizable increase since 2002. Much of that growth has been fueled by the rise in home broadband connections over the last four years. For a group of “high-powered” online users – early adopters of home broadband who are the heaviest internet users – the internet is their primary news source on the average day.

And it’s the younger readers who’ve forsaken newspapers almost entirely.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is taking bids for the 12 Knight Ridder papers it’s dumping, um, divesting, in the buyout of the bigger chain.

2 Comments on “Newspapers' Future is Online”

  1. #1 Alan VanderMolen
    on Mar 23rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm

    Regional titles of MSM in Asia also following suit. BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal Asia, et al, cutting costs (and staff) in print editions and investing heavily in their portals. Also, these MSM are engaging bloggers in co-creation. Local language pubs in hardcore newspaper markets — Jpn, Korea — are running hard at this, too.

  2. #2 jake
    on Mar 23rd, 2006 at 8:11 pm

    The interesting thing about the decline of the newspapers is that the papers have very good information about what why people are dropping their subscriptions. I know this because up until a year ago I had several papers as clients in my call center business. In cases where we called former subscribers to reup their subscriptions, we were required to record the reason for dropping the paper. The most common objection at all my clients was that the paper was too expensive. The second most common reason was that the paper was too liberal. And number three was was that they got their news from the internet. Of course there’s not much the papers can do about the first and third reasons, but there is plenty they can do about the second reason. And they do know this a problem because they gave us the questions to ask. (I can’t say the names of the papers, but they were in Boston, New York, Houston, San Francisco, San Antonio and Long Island… do the math. All had the too liberal objection on their lists.)