Would you miss your local paper?

Research recently published by the Pew Research Center (March 2009) reports that fewer than half of Americans surveyed would regard it as any great loss to the local community if their community newspaper folded.What do you think? Do you read your local community newspaper? Does it still have a role to play?

Marriott Cuts Back on Free Newspapers

Marriott hotels has announced that starting 1 June 2009 it will only deliver complimentary newspapers to US hotel guests who request them.  This follows a guest survey which shows a 25% decline in demand.  The move is expected to result in about 50,000 less newspapers being distributed each day.  Good for the environment (and Marriott) perhaps, but another blow to the US newspaper industry.  See the full article here at the San Diego Business Journal 

Only 3% of US Newspaper Reading Happens Online

Given the accepted wisdom that the migration of the print newspaper audience to free online versions has been largely responsible for the precarious financial position most traditional newspapers currently find themselves in, I was a little surprised by the conclusions reached in this article by Martin Langeveld of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, that only 3% of US newspaper reading takes place online.

Although this conclusion (based on an analysis of print pages read vs online pages viewed) is underpinned by some pretty big assumptions, such as the number of pages read by the average print newspaper reader (Langeveld estimate's 24 pages per edition), overall the logic used by Langeveld seems sound.  Taking this into account, can much of the blame for the demise of traditional print newspapers really be attributed to the popularity of their free online counterparts?