Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for June 25th, 2008

Only old people read newspapers ….

5 comments June 25th, 2008

…. so, if you want to reach the younguns, forget print, you gotta be on the Web. Right? Well, maybe, sorta, and depends. Some very clear trends are coming out of our market research here in the News Tower. One is immutable: Baby Boomers and their parents are diehard newspaper readers — and will likely remain so until, well, you get the point. Seventy-seven percent of 55-plus adults read the Sunday newspaper — an increase of nine points since 2005. Sixty-eight percent read the daily newspaper, which is the same as 2005.

(They are also big Web users, so don’t go thinking Boomers don’t do Web. We do. More on that next post.)

Half the 40-54-year-olds read the daily Register Star during the week. On Sunday, the number is 11 points higher for both groups. So aging GenXers and middle-aged Boomers are hanging on to their print papers pretty tightly. (P.S. The numbers are identical to what they were in 2005)

So, what about the younguns? Perhaps surprisingly to a lot of folks who think young ones are Web-only, the under 40 crowd in Winnebago and Boone counties are newspaper readers, too. One out of four adults 18-34 reads the newspaper during the week (about the same as in 2005). And, 37 percent of adults between 35-49 read the daily newspaper.   On Sundays, those percentages increase to 45 percent of 18-34-year-olds; and 51 percent of the 35-49 year olds — again, about the same as 2005.

We are transforming into an information center that delivers news, information and advertising across multiple platforms — magazines, daily/Sunday papers, online, and someday holograms — but that traditional newspaper in the Rock River Valley isn’t disappearing anytime soon. We’re a newspaper reading market.