Now Its Official! US Government Survey Shows Teens Read Print Just Seven Minutes a Day
And There’s No Guarantee They’re Reading a Newspaper.

Philip M. Stone May 8, 2005

Newspapers have known for some time they have been losing the young reader – but quite how bad it really is comes in an official US Government Time Use Survey. It shows, apart from homework, teens spend just seven minutes a day of their leisure time reading. And the older one gets the more one reads, making newspapers an ever more difficult demographic advertising sale.

After sleep and work Americans spend more time watching television than anything else. Indeed 11% of their entire lives are spent watching television, according to the survey sponsored by the US Department of Labor Statistics. But it is in reading habits that the survey breaks new ground by showing as one ages the more one reads.

Teens spend just seven minutes of their time each day reading some combination of books, magazines and newspapers. For the ideal 20-34 advertising demographics the reading time is still low – just 10 minutes, but at the opposite end of the scale, those aged 75 and older, the reading time is more than an hour a day.

Maybe one reason the old read more than the young is because, contrary to popular belief, the old are awake for longer each day -- the young sleep an average of 9.4 hours a day, outpacing even the over 75s by more than 20 minutes..

It all supports various private studies that the young don’t read newspapers and that one reason for overall decline in circulation is that the principal readers – the older generation – are dying off faster than they are replaced by the younger generation.

The survey also brings into question another quirk of the US Newspaper business. Sunday is by far the biggest advertising day for newspapers. Get rid of the inserts and the various advertising sections and you lose half the paper. But the Time Use Survey shows that it is on Saturday that Americans spend the longest time going shopping, not Sunday. If an advertiser really wants to catch “today’s” shopper the ad placement should be Saturday (instead of or in addition to Sunday is the challenge to the newspaper’s sales department!).

This trend has not been lost in Europe. In the UK for instance, many Saturday newspapers now rival Sunday papers in number of pages and sections.

So if the young are not reading print, what are they doing? It’s known they spend a fair amount of time online, but a new study by Mindshare shows they are also very busy using their mobile telephones. In fact, more than half the teens aged 13 – 17 have their own mobile phones. And what becomes more interesting to a marketer is that those teens with phones are far more likely to read print than they do the Internet.

The study showed that girls use their phones more than guys (at the risk of sounding sexist was that any great surprise?), but a stunning 83% of those teens having a phone use them at least once a day and 64% use them several times a day.

In Europe, the new tabloids aimed at the young crowd are very cognizant that this demographic like their mobile phones. Teens are invited to use their mobiles to send news items to the newspaper, to send in their electronic pictures taken on their picture-phones, and SMS messages fly in both directions between newspaper and consumer.

It’s a marketing lesson that US newspapers should pay close attention to. As has been written in many columns in followthemedia teens in particular like to read about themselves and they like to contribute information/pictures about their peer group.

But when you take the key statistics that it is the young woman who uses her mobile phone the most, and it is therefore the young woman who is more likely to read a newspaper then how come the average in US newspapers is that just 20% of stories and 30% of pictures are about women?

Those statistics, by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, could well point to one reason why women are also deserting newspapers, with one estimate that if the current trends continue some 19 million women will cancel their newspaper subscriptions in the next decade.

And that is not going to make advertisers happy. After all, women make 80% of all household-purchasing decisions, and yet newspapers continue to treat them as second-class news citizens.

A smart newspaper publisher, looking at how to stem circulation declines, could do worse than to institute polices aimed at attracting the young and women instead of continuing to offend those very demographics that control the purse strings.