Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Newspaper Publishing Industry

2.3.5 News 
consumption
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Another indicator of the state of newspaper publishing are developments in newspaper 
readership. Table 9 shows the time spend on newspaper reading in minutes for European 
countries in 2004/2005. Ireland, Norway, Finland, Iceland and the UK top the list. In Ireland, 
people spent more than 53 minutes on reading the newspaper. In Southern European 
countries, people spent less time reading the news; in Greece, people read a newspaper during 
16 minutes on average per day.
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PwC (2009) Newspaper publishing in the digital age moving-into-multiple-business-models. 
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In this par<
>agraph different indicators for news 
consumption are used. 1) daily reach = share of inhabitants that read a newspaper 2) readership density = 
circulation of newspapers per 1000 inhabitants 3) time spend reading newspapers (or other news sources, 
when indicated). Note also that readership and circulation are not equal measures as often a single 
newspaper copy is read by more than one person (e.g. other household members). The average readership 
per copy varies for different newspaper titles and is higher for free than for paid-for dailies. 

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Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries 
40
 
Table 9: Average time spent reading newspapers in minutes Europe and share of non-readers 
on an average day N = 32.765 (2004/2005) (Elvestad & Blekesaune, 2008) 
Country
 
Newspaper reading (minutes)*
 
Non-readers (percentage)
 
Ireland
 
53.4
12.8
Norway
 
43.5
4.4
Finland
 
40.3
6.4