Things That Make You Go Hmmmm.
I wonder why the so-called developing nations are so far ahead of the U.S. in newspaper readership?
I find this fact astonishing: In one year, 2,100 newspapers were started in India. There are already 60,000 newspapers being read.
Here in the capital, a bustling megalopolis with 15 million residents, two new dailies have hit the streets in the last four months, angling for their share of a market already divided among more than a dozen competitors.
In 2004, there were 1,456 newspapers in the United States. You can count on one hand the number of new dailies that came on the scene, and those were usually tri-weeklies that made the jump to six or seven days.
People in the world’s biggest democracy still respect newspapers; they count on them for information and read them in numbers that would make publishers, editors and advertisers in the United States drool.
One can make the argument that internet penetration is much much lower compared to the U.S., and that would be correct. But total U.S. newspaper circulation has been declining for decades, even with the launch of USA Today.
Time will tell if the expanding middle class in these countries eventually will change how they get their news.
In the meantime, newspapers in the U.S. have to keep their noses to the grindstone to figure out ways to attract new readers.