Cannibalization and Media Shifts

Newspaper readership, online readership and replacement issues

Few issues raise blood pressure in newspaper offices more than the issue of cannibalization -- whether newspaper Web sites expedite the decline in readership of printed newspapers.

The NAA's "MORI Power Users 2006: Newspapers' Online Audience In a Broadband World" study confirms that for a slim segment of the Internet population, the answer is yes -- but these users are just as likely to replace printed newspapers with Yahoo!, Google and MSN as with a newspaper site. The issue also overlooks other media realities, possibly dwarfing these concerns:

The majority of general online users, defined as U.S. consumers who have been online during the past month, read print newspapers. And print newspapers continue to enjoy local-reach numbers beyond the imagination of newspaper Web sites. Three-fourths (75 percent) of general online users have read a weekday printed newspaper in the past week; only 25 percent have looked at a newspaper Web site in the past week. The potential growth among print newspaper readers who are online but who do not visit the newspaper Web site is enormous.

Most newspaper Web site readership continues to be a duplication of the print audience. Among general online users, in the past week, 54 percent read only print, 20 percent read the paper and the newspaper Web site, 6 percent read only the newspaper Web site and 20 percent read neither.

Internet audiences are more likely to use online instead of print for immediacy and functionality -- breaking news and search not because they want to read newspapers online for free.

Newspaper publishers have not clearly defined the value of their online destinations to consumers.

In a study for the Online Publishers Association, media researcher and professor John Cary of GreyStone Communications divided the 18-34 year old group into "unsettled" and "newly settled" - essentially college kids as likely to go out on the town as to study vs. those settling into new relationships, careers and lives (like my friends).

The Power Users research shows that 50 percent of 18-34 year olds are not married, by far the highest percentage of unmarried adults in any age category, and a symbolic split between the "newly settled" and the "unsettled."

Download the full report.