Dead trees still rule

Most newspaper readers still prefer paper over computer screens. Martin Langeveld updates a study he completed last year and finds that of the total time people spend reading papers, 95.4 percent of it takes place with the paper in hand and 4.6 percent is online.

From his post at Nieman Journalism Lab:

U.S. newspapers have not pushed much of their audience to their websites, nor have they followed the migration of their readership to the web. Their combined print and online readership metrics, whether measured in pageviews or in time spent, show that there’s been significant attrition since last year in the total audience for newspaper content, and that the fraction of that audience consuming newspaper content online remains in the low-to-mid single digits.

The bad news is that people are spending less time with newspapers. Langeveld calculates that readers are spending about one-fifth less time with a paper this year compared to two years ago.