Saturday, November 2, 2013

Remember when you had a paper route?



More or less, there aren't any paper boys/girls any more. At least, not in all the towns with a newspaper that isn't "family owned"….

And some day I guess our children are going to say, more or less, there aren't any newspapers any more. That's the way we're headed. Here are some stats from the newspaper blogger, Newsosaur:

I'm not sure if that will be a bad thing….today's newspapers are mostly slim, short on news and superficially entertaining if you don't count the sports section. I daresay the sports section is doing the best job of surviving the calamity that's hit newspapers in the last 8 years.

If you're a young adult, maybe you haven't really noticed: America's newspapers have lost 57% of their advertising revenues in the last 8 years. Big classified advertisers—real estate, employment, cars/trucks—have shifted to the internet, they'll never return to The Daily Bugle.

The newspaper industry has stopped publishing meaningful advertising and circulation figures…no need to spend a lot of time wondering why….

I say you may not have noticed the newspaper death spiral if you're a young adult, because young adults famously aren't reading newspapers these days. Most newspaper readers are over 55.

That is, the remaining readers are mostly old-timers, because newspaper sales and readership are dropping like a rock. I bet you know a couple folks who dropped their subscriptions.

Right now, Americans are buying about the same number of newspapers they bought in 1940, roughly 41 million papers a day. Daily newspaper circulation peaked at 63.3 million in 1984. That's right, it's been declining for 30 years….

And of course, the number of households has jumped 200% since 1940. Here's what that means: just before World War II, newspaper publishers sold more papers than there were households every day, because some households got both a morning and afternoon paper.

Today, only about a third of households buy a newspaper.

Some folks of a certain age just can't do coffee/breakfast in the morning without rustling the pages of a newspaper….



Oh, by the way, I remember attending a Chamber of Commerce annual dinner in the early 1980s, about 500 gents in the room, the speaker asked the crowd "How many of you had a paper route when you were a kid?", and most of the men raised their hands….









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