The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Death of Reading, Part MCMLXVI

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The Spectacle Blog

Death of Reading, Part MCMLXVI

By Robert Stacy McCain on 12.17.08 @ 7:16PM

The newspaper industry has been circling the toilet bowl for years. Conservatives love to claim that liberal bias explains the decline of newspaper circulation and ad revenue. Technophiles say that dead-tree Old Media is losing circulation because readers are going to the Web.

Whatever the merits of these explanations, they are not sufficient to account fully for the loss of readership. I have often argued, in response, that what we are actually seeing is a decline of reading, period. Pay attention the next time you're on an airplane. Notice how relatively few of your fellow passengers -- especially the younger ones -- pass their time reading a newspaper, magazine or book. Rather, they're watching the in-flight movie or listening to their IPods. People are reading less than they once did, a tendency especially pronounced among the young. As a result, there is less demand for the written word.

Evidence for my explanation can be seen in the recent news that several major magazine publishers are slashing their Web staffs. Conde Nast, for instance, let go 25 of their 30 online writers, while Fortune magazine cut a half-dozen Internet staffers. This computes neither with the "liberal bias" theory nor the "Good Riddance, Old Media" theory of readership decline. Fortune and the magazines in the Conde Nast stable -- Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, etc. -- aren't losing readership because of politics, and their efforts to lure an online readership have not been cost-effective.

The Readership Crisis, as we might call it, is a demand-side problem. It is not caused by anything that publishers have done (or not done), and it cannot be solved by the facile assumption that losses in print readership will be compensated for by gains in online readership.

View all comments (6) | Leave a comment

Roy| 12.17.08 @ 8:21PM

That could be, but I suspect at least part of the problem is that anything you can get online you can get somewhere else online free. So it's not like anyone was paying to read what those writers wrote.

I am really glad I don't have to figure out how to make money as a news media company in today's world.

DaveS| 12.17.08 @ 9:32PM

Comment lines promote feedback, so TAS and other outlets are very facilitating. It's not often one keeps a thought long enough to respond in the usual way to newspaper content.

Thomas| 12.18.08 @ 9:13AM

Yes, in general readership has declined. Videos, interactive games, personal portable listening devices and, most notably the cellular telephone have all deeply cut into the pastime of recreational reading. And part of the decline in newspaper and news magazine readership is due to this. Indicating, perhaps, that a significant percentage of news readership was done, not for enlightenment concerning current events, but, rather, for recreation [simply to waste time].

Not to ignore electronic communication's part in this decline, it must be noted that newspapers and especially news magazines, can not hope to compete with television and the internet in the timely delivery of news.

So it would seem likely that the combination of alternative avenues of more rewarding recreational activities, sources for the more timely delivery of news and the means of increased interactivity for the consumer have all conspired to bring about the death of the print media.

Related, but slightly off topic, is the fact that electronics are beginning to replace paper for literature of all types. Publishing houses are concentrating more on established fiction writers, public figures and niche markets for their traditional publishing activities. It is becoming harder and harder for an unestablished writer with no name recognition to get published by an established publishing house. Some are now going electronic on their own to publish their work.

The World, she is a changin'.

David Shoup| 12.18.08 @ 1:09PM

I am reading less than I did. When I subscribed to "The Conservative Chronicle", its presence in my house demanded that I read it. The same articles hidden away on my laptop do not have the same draw.

J David| 12.18.08 @ 2:03PM

Ann Coulter and J Corsi don't seem to be suffering from poor book sales. The conservative bloggers and news-blog sites seem to be getting a lot of traffic, as does Drudge and Brietbart. There are still massive bestsellers in every genre even in gathering recessionary gloom.
Where I used to read more dead trees-and-ink, I now spend 8+ hours reading a laptop screen, and SHUN newspapers as the propaganda arms of the commie-lib Dem oligarchy that they really are. I don't need to buy my fishwrap, I can use shopping guides and local free delivery papers for that. And despite well in excess of 1000 books that I own, they are now too ridiculously expensive to buy except from rummage sales.