It is conventional wisdom that newspapers need to grow (and monetize) their online audience to sustain themselves in the digital age. Losing that online audience has to be newspapers’ greatest fear.
But that’s exactly what a new report by IBM has found. “Online newspapers are the only digital media category that dropped in popularity last year,” according to Business Insider’s Lauren Hatch.
More than 3,000 people participated in the survey, but less than a third were from the U.S. I’m not sure if that makes any difference because the findings seem consistent with other research and anecdotal findings I’ve encountered. For example, young people (18-24) are ignoring newspapers at an alarming rate. According to Dorian Benkoil, who wrote about it at Poynter.org, the percentage of young people decreased sharply with roughly 64 percent in 2008 saying they had viewed a newspaper online versus 54 percent in 2009.
“The implications are important for those in the news business and illustrate that newspapers may have less time than they were counting on to figure out how to succeed online,” Benkoil writes.
