What's Black and White and STILL Read All Over?

Almost three months ago, I grabbed my last edition of The Capital Times out of the company mailbox before heading home for the day. About the same time, I switched my laptop's homepage from the default to Madison.com/tct, ready to embrace the newspaper’s pioneering foray into cyberspace.

I don’t log on at home as much as I thought I would—the kid, the dogs and summer in Madison all conspire to keep me away from the computer. It seems the evening newspaper ritual I had hoped to continue in cyberspace is instead lost to the hands of time.

I keep up with the Wednesday edition and Thursday’s 77 Square, both of which appear in my driveway once a week tucked inside the Wisconsin State Journal. But I know it’s only a fraction of TCT news, information and opinion I should absorb as a citizen and a journalist. How ironic it feels to be so unplugged, so disconnected from a news source that’s now—in theory at least—so connected to the world over the Internet.

According to a recent poll, I’m not the only newspaper reader whose habits haven’t changed much in the last two years, despite the doom-and-gloom reports that readership is plummeting. This week Editor & Publisher reported that 62 percent of respondents to a Readership Institute poll said they’ve never logged onto their local paper’s website. And like me, only 14 percent said they’ve visited in the last seven to 30 days.

“Readers are more engaged with the print newspaper than newspaper Web site,” the article stated.

But here’s the quote that nearly knocked me off my big, red office chair: “…[R]eading customers aren’t deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are.”

Madison Magazine associate publisher Mike Kornemann, who was with Capital Newspapers (which owns both The Cap Times and the Wisconsin State Journal) for many years, tells me advertisers are too infatuated with the younger demographic into the wild, wild web. Another irony here, as Mike points out, is that since newspapers have always done poorly with the younger demographic, why would they be anymore likely to find Next Gen online when they don't think what newspapers print is relevant to their lives just yet?

Kids don’t start looking for news in any large numbers until they turn into grownups with jobs and families and decide it’s time to put down roots. That’s when trusted, reliable news and information about their communities, their countries and their world starts to register. That’s when they become newspaper consumers.

I’m beginning to think newspapers should stop chasing their tails and start to refocus on the loyal, engaged readers (and consumers: Helloooo, affluent, retiring baby boomers!) they apparently still court. If you like the Readership Institute’s study, readership has only declined an teency-weency bit since the group’s last report in 2006.

Advertisers panic, and all of a sudden it’s a foregone conclusion that technology has won the arm-wrestling match over how we consume our news?

I don’t buy it.