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

Figure 12: News consumption sources US (2001-2010)
Source: The Marketing Data Box, Hubspot & Pew Research, 2010) Based on data from Pew Project 
for Excellence in Journalism, 2010. 
Danish, German, Dutch and English research show similar developments (Schrøder & Larsen, 
2010; Schrøder & Kobbernagel, 2010; Huysmans & de Haan, 2010; Slot & Munniks de Jongh 
Luchsinger, 2011a; Eimeren & Vrees, 2011).
 
For the majority of people in the age groups 
between 25 and 65 years, television still is most worthwhile for gathering the latest news and 
background information. But research results show that the majority of the youngest age 
group (between 14 and 24 years) turns to the internet as most worthwhile news medium.
Age seems to be the most important variable to explain the time spent on reading a newspaper 
(Horrigan, 2006; Elvestad & Blekesaune, 2008; Slot & Munniks de Jongh Luchsinger, 
2011a). Other research shows that generation, more than age, is the main determining factor 
for media consumption, meaning that young people who spend little time on newspaper 
reading now, will not automatically start reading more news once they grow older. According 
to Lee and Delli Carpini (2010) people stick to the media with which they grew up when they 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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were young. Thus, children who grew up with the newspaper as the dominant news medium 
will continue reading newspapers when they are adults. 
With respect to (digital) media, three generations can be discerned: (1) digital natives, (2) 
digital immigrants, and (3) digital settlers. Digital natives are born after 1980 and grew up in 
the age of the internet. Digital immigrants are people between 30 and 64 years, who grew up 
with radio and television as the dominant news media. Although this generation did not grow 
up with the internet, they learned to use the medium later in their lives. The digital settlers (65 
years of age or older), grew up in the newspaper era. Radio and television were introduced 
during their youth. Online news consumption will largely reflect offline news consumption; 
digital settlers will turn to newspaper websites more frequently and digital immigrants will be 
likely to turn to websites of radio and television broadcasters. But in all cases the decline of 
print newspaper reading seems to be a structural trend in Europe and the US. 
American research by PEW Internet and American Life showed that reading news is the third 
most popular online activity for Americans on an average day, just after checking e-mail and 
searching (Horrigan, 2006). The WAN-IFRA reported that between 1999 and 2004 the 
audience for newspaper websites grew 350% (WAN IFRA, 2005). Horrigan (2006) found that 
35% of internet users check online news everyday and almost one-third of all American 
internet users are reading traditional newspaper websites.
Online news readers get their news at different times during the day and from different news 
sources; from news alerts (RSS feeds), email newsletters, news aggregators, online 
newspapers, and increasingly also from mobile news aggregators or though mobile news apps 
on their smart phones and tablets. There are only scattered data on the time spent on these 
diverse news sources. The available data seem to indicate that the online publications of 
legacy newspapers and broadcasters still attract a considerable share of the visits to online 
news sources, but that aggregators such as Goolge News, Yahoo News, Digg, NetVibes 
attract increasing shares of online news readers (see Experian Hitwise for OECD 2010 in 
(Wunsch-Vincent, 2010, pp. 30-31)). It is to be expected that with the increasing use of 
mobile devices the employment of aggregators and tools that enable users to select feeds from 
different sources and customize and personalize their news offer will also grow. In Europe 
especially English language websites (WSJ, NYT, Financial Times, the Economist, BBC) will 
be able to attract significant traffic from abroad.