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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