Newspaper audience aged severely since 2010

The population of people reading newspapers has aged dramatically in the last three years to the point that nearly three-quarters of the audience is aged 45 or older, according to my analysis of survey and census data. 

When I performed the same analysis using the same methodology in 2010, only half of the newspaper audience was aged 45 or higher, reflecting a rapidly growing rejection of  newspapers among most younger readers.

The rapid graying of the newspaper audience has huge and unpleasant implications for publishers, as discussed in a moment.  First, the data:

As illustrated in the chart immediately below, the Pew Research Center reported in a survey last fall that newspaper readership is heavily concentrated in the upper age ranges of the population.  While only 6% of respondents in the 18-24 bracket said they had read a newspaper in the previous day, Pew found that fully 48% of those over the age of 65 had done so. Here is how that looks:

I compared the Pew data with census data to estimate the actual numbers of newspaper readers in each of the age cohorts. The graph below compares the percentage of newspaper readers in an age group (blue) with the percentage of individuals in the population as a whole (orange).

As you can see, 74% of the newspaper audience is aged 45 years or older, even though the two oldest age cohorts collectively constitute 39% of the population.  At the other end of the continuum, only 6% of the newspaper audience is 18-24, even though this age group constitutes 10% of the population.   

The above calculations caused me to check my math several extra times, because the new data show that the newspaper audience has aged radically since I performed the same analysis in 2010, discovering that only 51% of newspaper readers were older than 45.  If the aging of the newspaper audience seemed like a problem for the industry in back in 2010, then the far older audience today can be regarded as nothing less than a crisis. Here’s why: 

∷ The mature skew of the audience is unappealing to most advertisers, who generally target individuals in the early life stages of forming households and raising children.  The older audience delivered by newspapers could reduce the sales potential for an industry that already has lost more than half of its advertising since hitting an all-time high of $49.4 billion in 2005.

∷ Absent a sudden influx of twenty- and thirty-something readers, the heavy dependence of the newspaper industry on aged and aging readers means that its audience at some point will die off.  While the Social Security Administration says a 65-year-old woman statistically can look forward to nearly 20 more years of life, the above data clearly demonstrate that the industry is failing to replace older readers with younger individuals.   At some point, the newspaper audience may contract so severely that (a) publishers cannot attract enough advertisers, (b) publishers no longer enjoy the economies of scale necessary to print profitably or (c) both of the above.

∷ The weak readership in the younger segments of the population suggests that both the form and content of the print product are not widely appealing to the generations that came of age in the digital age. While there doesn’t appear to be much hope of attracting a significant number of sub-45 individuals to the print product, publishers have a shot at extending and protecting their valuable franchises by developing digitally native products that could – and should – be embraced by the Digital Natives. 

The time for the industry to pivot from print to pixels appears to running low. In the meantime, none of us is getting any younger.  

UPDATE (1.17.2013):  The above post was challenged in this article at Poynter.Org.  Following is my response to the issues raised by the author:

Scarborough Research says 68% of the newspaper audience is over 45 and I say 74%. So, we are not too far apart about the state of play today. 

As for the velocity of change, I based my analysis and my blog post on two studies from Pew, which asked where people got their news. In 2010, 21% of those between the ages of 18-29 said they used newspapers.  In 2012, the number fell to 8%.  In 2010, 26% of those aged 30-49 said newspapers. In 2012, the number dropped to 14%. Newspaper readership also declined among older reader but not nearly as much. 

Like my friend, Tom Rosenstiel, the author of the Poynter article, I would rather fix the problems than debate the data.  In his new role at the American Press Institute, he is in an exceptional position to do so.