It's hard to believe, I know, but 62 percent of the American public never picks up a national newspaper. No New York Times. No USA Today. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
That's huge. More than half of the population never sees a national newspaper. What are these people doing? Where are these people getting their news? What are they reading?
They are reading local newspapers. According to a Gallup poll on media use conducted in December 2004, 44 percent of the American population read a local newspaper every day. Fourteen percent read it several times a week and 27 percent read it only occasionally. Only 15 percent never read a local paper.
Why are people so much more drawn to their local papers instead of national newspapers? Patrick Lafferty, a fellow graduate student, said the reason is simple. Local newspapers have coupons. While it is sometimes hard to tell when Patrick is being cynical and when he is being serious, I think that there is some truth to his statement. Coupons are a driving force in purchasing papers. I remember that every Sunday after church, my mother would purchase the Sunday edition of the Great Bend Tribune and search through the coupon section before making her weekly trip to Dillon's.
I think that the idea of coupons can be expanded to uncover a broader theme. People want information that is relative to them. They want to know who got married, who got divorced, who died and who was pulled over for speeding. In my hometown paper, The Ellinwood Leader, the most read section of the paper was the "People We Know," a section that highlighted who was having a birthday, whose family was coming to town, who's grandchild won the spelling bee and much, much more.
The taste of national news acquired through the Associated Press is enough to sustain their need to know about what is going on in the outside world. This information is nicely supplemented by their local television news stations, which draw 51 percent of the population every day according to Gallup.
We talk a lot about how someday all of our news will be customized to our liking by way of the Internet. We will log onto the web and we will be inundated by stories that we are specifically altered to our liking. EPIC 2015 does a nice job of painting this picture for us. I say this is already happening with our local papers. They are the epitome of custom content, and obviously that is what people want. The numbers don't lie.
*Graphs were created using Gallup Poll data gathered in December 2004.
Cynical? Me? To be fair (to myself), I am make every effort to be both cynical and serious, thank you very much. But thank you for the shout out!