This early frontrunner in the Most Misleading Headline of 2009 comes from Martin Langeveld, a 30-year newspaper veteran writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab:
Print is still king: Only 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online
This is so mind boggling I hardly know where to start. But I’ll give it a shot.
First, Langeveld’s claim is based on two key assumptions: 1) that 2.128 readers read each daily print copy and 2.477 readers read each Sunday print copy; 2) that each reader looks at 24 pages per copy. That equals 87.1 billion “page views” per month for printed newspapers. Meanwhile online newspapers averaged only 3.2 billion page views per month. All told that’s 90.3 billion page views. 87.1 billion is 96.5% of that total, ergo only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.
I have no idea if each printed copy of each daily newspaper is read on average by more than two people each day, but something about that figure sure seems suspicious unless there are communes of newspaper sharers tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains passing around daily copies of the paper like its a roach at a Phish concert. Regardless, I’m willing to grant Langeveld the benefit of the doubt.
The second flaw in his assumption is that page views in print are comparable to page views online. They aren’t. The cost of a page view online for the reader is much, much higher than the cost of a page view in print, where a page view is achieved simply by flipping to the next page. Online reading doesn’t work the same way. Offline each page of newsprint may contain three, four, five, or even six articles. Online pages almost exclusively contain one article. A page view online equals an article picked out by the reader because it was of interest. Therefore in terms of news consumption a page view online is tremendously more valuable than a page view off line, where a page view is counted, again, simply by flipping the page, which may happen because the news on the previous page was never interesting to the reader to begin with. In other words, Langeveld is counting as page views on par with online page views the act of a reader avoiding news that does not interest him. This is an obvious problem for his argument.
But the biggest problem is that his argument completely misses the spot. Newspapers are now the least popular means by which people consume the news. The newspaper battle isn’t between offline and online newspapers. It’s between newspapers and the internet (and television). Right now more people get their news on the internet than through newspapers and that trend is continuing to increase each year at a breakneck pace. CNN.com is one of the most popular news websites in the world but it’s excluded from Langeveld’s analysis because it’s not a newspaper. Likewise the BBC. Or Politico. Or Salon. Or Slate. Or, or, or.
If you want to know why newspapers are failing I’d say you don’t need to look any further than people like Langeveld. His article is testament enough.
my thoughts are on my blog http://tinyurl.com/cqe7eq
[...] We’ve seen and dealt with this sort of assumption before. Newspaper readership figures are often based on the assumption that each newspaper is ready by 2+ people. This is how you can arrive at an outrageous figure like 1.9 billion people reading the newspaper each day when the figure is likely much, much, much smaller than that. [...]