Continued evidence that newspapers are approaching their end:  The Pew Research Center reports that even as Americans are consuming more news, they’re reading fewer newspapers. Two notable findings:

Overall, the proportion of daily print newspaper readers decreased from 38% in 2006 to 30% in 2008, before slipping to 26% this year. That represents a 32% drop in the size of the newspaper-reading population in just four years.

In a stark illustration of the shifting generational dynamics of news consumption, just 8% of the 26% cohort who read a print newspaper every day was between the ages of 18 and 30, compared to about 20% of the U.S. population.

In other words, they’ve lost two generations. (I started reading the newspaper at age 11. None of my kids reads the newspaper.) The report also finds that the proportion of people who get their news from newspapers, even the digital editions, is declining as well.

On a side note, the grammarian in me can’t help correcting the headline, “Pew: Americans Consume More News, Less Newspapers.” Rather than “less,” they mean to say “fewer.” Going forward, I think that fewer and fewer of us will know that.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.