Are folks leaving the newspaper for the Internet?
This, of course, has been the $64,000 question in the newspaper industry for the past decade.
At The Evening News, we have seen huge increases in traffic to our Web sites, and a small reduction in the number of subscribers to the print edition.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a few people are dropping readership of the newspaper because they get their local news online, but not many.
The available evidence seems to suggest, rather, that most people have developed new habits for using media of all kinds. They read the newspaper for certain kinds of information and entertainment, go to the Internet for other information and entertainment, and turn on the television or radio or any of the many other sources for other select reasons.
A new study of Ohio readers suggests that’s exactly what’s happening.
The research, conducted by Belden Associates for the Ohio Newspaper Association, found that use of newspapers by readers remains strong, and that use of newspaper Web sites is growing. Now more than 80 percent of all people surveyed used one or the other to get their local news in the last week - far more than any other sources, such as television or radio.
Perhaps more important, more people said they were turning to both the newspaper Web site and the local newspaper than a year ago, while the majority said they were spending less time watching television, listening to the radio or reading magazines.
None of this means that newspapers are the news source of the future. That’s probably not the case.
But it suggests that for the time being people still are using both the print and on-line versions of the newspaper.