Print Readers/Website Readers -- What's the ratio?

I've read about plenty of instances in various industries -- being fired for e-mails, stealing the company's time, etc. I was more or less offering that thought in jest, but if businesses decided to ever clamp down on non-productive Internet use...

 

This sounds like it should be hopeful for newspapers, an argument for trying to build them up, emphasize and promote them more, instead of less. It's what I wish, and can only hope, would happen.

A very real problem now, however, is that newspaper companies have been cut back so much, budget- and staff-wise, that editors and managers are being forced to make hard choices about where and how to divide and allot resources.

And instead of serving and working with both the print and electronic formats well, the strained and stretched resources only go so far, so that nobody gets the kind of product that they could otherwise out of either side.

Current company budget and staffing levels -- and profit-margin demands -- don't seem to support all media efforts well.

Given those options, as Babs said, companies are making another choice, and working with an eye toward the future -- at the cost of the print newspaper.

 

Just my two cents... I was talking to my barber (40s, typical good ol' boy) and he told me he reads all his newspapers online; ours, the one in the nearby city where he lives and the one from his hometown.
Admittedly that's a very small sample, but I don't think we can continue to think only young folks go online for news and older folks won't.

 

People in their 40s were in their 20s when the internet first spread. I wouldn't hesitate to consider them part of the internet generation.

 

The demographic that matters most if newspapers are to get a hold of the future: the 21-34 college grad with $75K+ household income.

Those folks are going to the web dramatically.

In the last 5 yrs at this metro, web readership for that group has risen from 30 percent to almost 60 percent. Meanwhile, that group's print readership has declined from 50 percent to 30. In short, the reading habits have virtually reversed themselves in only 5 years. Researchers also say the change is accelerating.

To remember in all this: that 21-34 college grad group is still a small part of the total readership. And while it can not be ignored, neither can newspapers ignore the greater majority of its audience.

It is a balancing act that no one has mastered, but I'm wondering if there might be an answer in something I've yet to see. The most popular news websites are aggregators, such as Drudge and Deadspin. When will a newspaper be daring enough to use its website for its original content AND be an aggregator?

 

In what you're saying, one could infer that the only magic the Internet has is one-stop convenience, that newspapers still have a lot to offer, but people are more and more getting that content from aggregator sites that steal link to it. In the end, people say, "I saw that on Drudge," not "I saw that on the New York Times."

 

Read that as an indictment of that particular paper and its site. A property that size should be doing at least 250K page views a day Monday thru Friday, which means they should have done 100-150K in that particular time range.

 

Don't kid yourself. Your IT department can go back and find anything you've ever typed at work. This was proven to me recently.

 

They do. I know a guy who got fired for spending too much time monitoring his auctions. They warned him, he didn't quit, goodbye.

 

Which is why I no longer fire up MSN Messenger at work. I have friends who are idiots and send some pretty politically incorrect messages at times.

 

I would argue it should be higher during that frame of time. At least for television station's Web sites, the majority of the hits come during the work day when people are logging on to see what's happening. Either that, or during severe weather.

You're right on about where the hits should be normally.

 

I would bet that the email in question showed that the website received 16K visits in that seven-hour period, and people got their panties in a bunch thinking that it was 16K page views.

Kids have been born, raised and taught to drive since "hits" was last used as a Web metric. People who continue to talk about "hits" in 2008 almost invariably cannot define the term. As Inigo Montoya said, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."