.and from Slashdot:
| Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates |
| from the stop-the-presses dept. |
| posted by timothy on Wednesday October 28, @17:44 (The Media) |
| https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/28/2131236/Decline-In-US-Newspaper-Readership-Acceler|
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US [1]newspaper
circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across
the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through
September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a
success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper
Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their
ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have [2]ceased to be a mass medium by
any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist
and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called
Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of
Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31
percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live
or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably
will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get
busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too
late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers
or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers
which [3]tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly
local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a
lock on local ad markets."

Discuss this story at:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/10/28/2131236

Links:
0. http://hughpickens.com/
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603272.html
2. http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/10/newspapers-mass-less-mass-medium.html
3. http://www.leader-vindicator.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20382685&BRD=2758&PAG=461&dept_id=572980&rfi=6