The next time someone says ….

March 30th, 2009 at 03:05pm Linda Grist Cunningham

….. newspapers are dying, ship them this set of quotes from John Sturm, Newspaper Association of America president and CEO:

“Anyone who thinks that newspapers have an ‘audience problem’ need only look at recent Nielsen Online numbers for the newspaper industry.  In January, nearly 75 million unique visitors used newspaper Web sites — an all-time high and a 12 percent increase from January ’07.  That means 44 percent of all active Internet users visited a newspaper site in January.  Newspapers, in aggregate, delivered 80 percent more unique visitors than CNN’s digital network, 85 percent more than Yahoo! News and 442 percent more than Google News!

“In print, newspaper readership declined a modest 2.7 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to Scarborough Research.  Meanwhile, our friends at the broadcast TV networks lost 7 percent of their total audience in the last 3 months of 2008 alone.

“More than 100 million adults read the newspaper on an average weekday, compared to 63 million that watched the World Series, 42 million that visited Amazon.com in the past month and 60 million that watch any reality TV show.

“And those elusive 18-34 year olds — 30 percent are still reading on an average weekday and nearly 60 percent over the course of a week. Hardly an indication of an industry in the throes of death.  On the contrary, our audience — the true measurement of the health of a medium–is strong and getting stronger.”

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