Just watched/read/flipped through a really interesting Slideshare presentation by Lee Rainie and Tom Rosenstiel from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that I wanted to share as it seems to ask the real question about where newspaper readers have gone.

Everyone knows that newspaper audiences have fragmented, but listen to any talking head with an interest in the media and they’ll tell you that they’ve all gone to blogs (for content) Craigslist (for classified adverts) and social networks for the rest.

Of course that’s true of some people, and you can understand why bloggers who are surrounded by like-minded people would think it’s true for most, but what about  groups of readers who have never read a blog? My mum didn’t stop buying the newspaper because she started reading Guido Fawkes and Perez Hilton. My mum has never seen a blog and didn’t even know what Gmail was until I told her yesterday, and this is a woman who is educated, has run her own business and worked with computers as a sales rep.

While skewed to an American audience, it’s interesting that the percentage of Americans getting no news on an average day has gone up from 14% in 1998 to 19% in 2008. Given how many more news sources there are today and how many new ways there are to consume it, this is almost like comparing apples and pears, which just goes to show what an important drop in news consumption this really is.

Papers being in trouble because they’re losing readers to other media is one problem, but if it’s because people care less about the core product then it’s not papers that are in trouble: it’s the news industry.

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