Average Age of Newspaper Readers is 55

Posted on October 12, 2005

A Carnegie Corporation study reports that the average age of newspaper readers is 55. Newspaper readership has basically fallen off a cliff since the advent of the Internet.

Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups. Newspaper profits and the stock prices of the companies that own them were also down during the first half of 2005. The biggest newspapers are cutting staffs, closing foreign bureaus and taking other steps to meet their owners' profit goals.
Most of these dire trends are nothing new. Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction. Since the advent of the Internet, a common version of the doom forecasts has the ink-on-paper news being supplanted by something not-quite-yet-describable on the Web.

First the newspapers had to compete with cable news. Now it's the Internet. Most of the newspapers have simply moved to the Web. Still, there are a lot of people who still read newspapers. Editor and Publisher says on any given weekday 55 million newspapers are sold nationally.