Why Circulation Keeps Dropping   

Blame it on “birth cohort replacement.”

The newspaper industry's major, enduring problem is declining circulation. National weekday circulation has dropped annually for the last 13 years, Sunday circulation for seven.

Now the Newspaper Association of America sometimes can come up with a positive spin for these negative numbers, as it did in an October report stating that 54.3 percent of all adults in the largest 50 markets had read a newspaper the day before they were polled, up from 53.5 percent the previous spring.

But the fact remains that circulation has been sagging and likely will continue to do so. The culprit? Something called "birth cohort replacement." At least that's the conclusion of an analysis published in the spring 2000 issue of the Newspaper Research Journal and written by Wolfram Peiser, a professor at the University of Mainz in Germany.

For those who, like me, are untutored in sociological jargon, a birth cohort is a group of people born over a certain period of time. The entire adult population of the United States is made up of a series of birth cohorts.

Over time, of course, the cohorts change, as those in their 20s move up to an older cohort, replaced in turn by aging teenagers.

What Peiser did was apply the results of daily newspaper readership studies to the shifting set of cohorts, relying on readership data developed by the General Social Survey. The survey each year asks adults a wide variety of questions, one of which is usually, "How often do you read the newspaper--every day, a few times a week, once a week, less than once a week, or never?" Peiser focused on daily readers.

Not surprisingly, the survey found the weakest newspaper readership among the youngest groups and the strongest among the older groups. But, more ominously, it found that younger people are increasingly less likely to pick up a paper each day.

For example, among those 18 to 22, 47 percent read a newspaper daily in 1972, while only 18 percent did in 1996, the year the study ended. For those 73 to 77, 75 percent read a daily in 1972 and 78 percent did in 1996. There were declines in most of the age groups between these extremes, especially the younger ones.

I'll skip the professor's comments about trend decomposition and cohort coefficients to get to the central point I have made before--newspaper circulation is declining because readers are dying off faster than they are being created.

The reason this trend is likely to continue can be found in studies done by the old Newspaper Advertising Bureau (now incorporated into the Newspaper Association of America), which found that newspaper-reading habits tend to be passed along from parent to child. Children born into newspaper-reading families tend to keep up the tradition; those born in non-newspaper families tend to become nonreaders.

The consequence of this is obvious: With fewer people reading newspapers in age groups heavily populated by parents, fewer children are likely to pick up the habit.

Can anything be done about this? Well, perhaps. Peiser notes that his data show substantial readership declines in the 1970s and in the first half of the 1990s, but relatively stable readership between 1982 and 1991.

He chalks this up to "intracohort change," which is a fancy way of saying that readership tendencies of a particular age group can be changed by events that affect all age groups. One development that might have helped stabilize readership in the 1982-1991 period was the dramatic improvement in the physical appearance of newspapers--especially due to increased use of color, thanks to the impact of USA Today. Another factor could be heavy promotion of circulation.

But now newspapers are much more attractive, and it's doubtful that further enhancements will make much of a difference. Heavy promotion might help, but it is hard to believe that alone will offset the looming "birth cohort replacement." Is there some other strategy that might help?

The key may lie in luring more young people to read newspapers. But persuading them to do so when they are not inclined to probably can be pulled off only by making a newspaper more attractive specifically to them. As appalling as the television networks' pandering to young people's interests can be, it might be time for newspapers to try the same thing--in a responsible way, of course.

Newspaper executives generally believe that they have a noble mission to inform the citizenry. But the citizenry has to read newspapers for the mission to be accomplished.