The Readership Institute’s 2008 survey of US newspaper readers, published as a pair of PDF reports, carried one reassuring finding and one that was not.
Print readership was relatively stable, down only slightly from 2006. The explanation the study offered was blunt: “reading customers aren’t deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are.” The decline that dominated the coverage of the industry was on the revenue side, not the readership side.
The online half of the survey was where the trouble sat. Sixty-two per cent of respondents said they had never visited their local daily newspaper’s website. The study called the potential to develop a strong, differentiated local online brand, and to build usage among people who do not read the paper much or who prefer to get news online, largely unexploited.
Worse, the readers papers did have online were lukewarm about what they found. Respondents rated the print product higher than the website on experience, and the study noted that because experiences correlate with behaviour, the higher engagement with print translated into higher readership while lower engagement with the sites showed up as lower usage.
The reading at the time was that papers were failing twice over — not attracting new readers online and not satisfying existing ones — and that the sensible response was to invest in the web before print readership began to fall sharply. The survey showed an audience and a market were there. What it also showed was that reaching them required more than print shovelware on the web.