Where they read the "paper"

Perusing the Nieman Journalism Lab website for a class assignment, I bumped, belatedly, into an April 13 article by Martin Langeveld in which he found that only a little more than 3 percent of the people who read newspapers do so online. It was based mostly on widely accepted Newspaper Association of America research but also a couple of assumptions by Langeveld, and it immediately became controversial.

Even if Langeveld's findings were off, as critics contended, the evidence seems to suggest that most people who read newspapers do so in print. That doesn't consider, of course, the large number of people who bypass newspapers altogether in seeking information, getting it from television, radio or from non-newspaper websites.

As newspapers struggle to maintain adequate newsgathering forces in the face of declining revenue, and difficulty in generating revenue from their online operations, they might well consider both how quickly they abandon print for the web -- and also what they need to do to make their websites more appealing.