Boomers still love print? Don't be surprised

Editors Weblog cites a study from the Newspaper Audience Databank that shows baby boomers in Canada still consume print (56% weekdays, 78% weekly cume): "Their readership habits have changed little over the past 20 years."

That should not be surprising. If you analyze the (publicly available) GSS data on U.S. readership and track birth year cohorts across time, you'll discover that statement to be generally true of ALL age cohorts. For any cohort, there is only a very slight downward trend over time.

The point is that media consumption patterns are set early in life, and tend to persist. The change that endangers the newspaper business model is not one that involves readers losing the habit. It is, instead, a generational change that involves losing the actual readers from the population pool. They are being replaced by people who grew up with iPods and instant messaging and SMS and the Web. And the new generation moving into place will grow up with on-demand video, primarily through the Web.

This change is slow enough that newspaper managers can miss it, mistaking temporary fluctuations for trends. One publisher recently crowed that his circulation was up 1.24% daily while most others were down, and concluded that he's strategically right and everybody else is wrong. Don't mistake the weather for climate.