The Sunday NY Times editorial pages had a large number of graphs, showing the changes in the American publics’ attitudes and habits over the last 25 years or so. Most the the graphs were mildly interesting, but one was striking: The number of Americans who say they read a newspaper daily has declined over that time from about 70% to about 40%. As someone who reads not one but two papers every day (plus various weekly magazines) I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days, and wondering what it signifies. It may mean only that more people are getting information from essentially the same sources over the Internet, through RSS syndication, newsreaders, or home pages like “My Yahoo.” My “My Yahoo” page, for example, has feeds from Reuters, AP, the Washington Post, and other publications. If people are simply viewing stories on line rather than in print, then the decline may not be significant. But if people are not reading information at all, or are getting information more and more from specialized (or pointedly biased) sites (such as Daily Kos on the left, or Michelle Malkin on the right, or any number of the hundreds of others that are out there), then there is a real risk that the decline in newspaper readership is coincident with an ongoing loss of a general “common” base of public knowledge. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is another question — you can argue it both ways (lack of common understanding and values = bad; decentralization of media power = good). But either way, the decline in newspaper readership is striking and, it seems to me, has strong implications in the political realm and other areas.
Categories: Media