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The Internet is causing a gradual «erosion of intensive readership» of the daily press, the authors state in their study with the same title
. They examined the use of news sites, which are largely placed on the Internet by newspaper publishers, and printed newspapers in the period from 2001 to 2006. This showed that daily newspapers lose particularly many loyal readers precisely where a strong turn towards the Internet as a news medium can be observed: «The stronger the increase in the use of online news in an age group, the more serious at the same time are the losses of daily newspapers.»
The age groups of 25- to 34-year-olds and 35- to 44-year-olds are particularly strongly affected. Among them, the proportion of regular readers of subscription daily newspapers fell from 50.5 to 37.4 and from 64.8 to 54.2 percent from 2001 to 2006. During the same period, the proportion of intensive users of news sites rose from 7.9 to 14.2 and from 7.0 to 12.3 percent. «Online and print do not simply run in parallel or even complement each other», the authors explain, «but increasingly dispute each other’s attention resources.» A transition is emerging from «experimental parallel use» towards the «habitualised decision» for print or online.
According to the study, the development underlines for publishers the necessity of rapidly and comprehensively advancing the digitisation of their brands in order to bind to themselves on the Internet the news consumers whom they are losing as newspaper readers. The authors also recall the forecast by Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner that daily newspapers would be distributed predominantly digitally in «five, ten or twenty-five years». «The present analysis gives corresponding visions an empirical basis in the present.»
The social and natural scientist Castulus Kolo runs the management consultancy future directions GmbH in Munich, while media scientist Robin Meyer-Lucht runs the media-strategy Berlin Institute in Berlin. For their analysis, the authors relied on the media-use studies Allensbach Advertising Media Analysis (AWA) and Allensbach Computer and Technology Analysis (ACTA).
