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The rise of
television 
Television (as well as other more recent
competitors) eventually began to have a negative impact on
newspapers. Particularly, the growth of cable television and its
host of specialized networks such as CNN in the 1980s and the
explosive new Internet of the 1990s prompted more and more
Americans to determine they really didn't need a newspaper. An
entire generation has by now grown up largely unaccustomed to a
newspaper reading habit. An American adult 34 years of age and
younger is only half as likely to read a daily newspaper as
adults aged 35 and above. The long-term implications of this for
newspapers are obvious.
And the consequences of these just-mentioned trends aren't
surprising. In 1994, television passed newspapers in advertising
revenue for the first time in history, and the gap between the
two grows wider every year. Habitual newspaper readers have
shrunk to a bare majority of American adults. (A cynical inside
joke is that the newspaper publisher hates to look at the
obituaries for fear of seeing how many more readers have just
been lost.) In the most recent six-month national circulation
report, only seven of the U.S.'s largest 25 newspapers showed a
circulation increase from five years previous (two of these seven
benefited from rival newspapers folding in the same market and
another was recovering from a long strike that saw it lose more
than half of its circulation).
The following chart demonstrates the sure-but-steady decline
in daily newspaper penetration (a measure of the percentage of
households subscribing to at least one daily newspaper) as well
as the explosive growth in television over the same span. The
second column shows the number of U.S. households in millions,
the third and final columns represent the circulation percentage
of daily newspapers in relation to households and the percentage
with television, respectively:
Year
|
Households
|
Newspapers
|
Television
|
| 1950 |
43.00 |
125.18 |
9.02 |
| 1955 |
47.62 |
117.91 |
64.47 |
| 1960 |
52.50 |
112.15 |
87.14 |
| 1965 |
56.90 |
106.08 |
92.62 |
| 1970 |
61.41 |
101.13 |
95.27 |
| 1975 |
70.52 |
86.02 |
97.14 |
| 1980 |
77.90 |
79.85 |
97.95 |
| 1985 |
86.53 |
72.54 |
98.12 |
| 1990 |
93.76 |
66.47 |
98.23 |
| 1995 |
97.06 |
59.95 |
98.29 |
| 2000 (est.) |
102.35 |
52.38 |
98.20 |
Source: Facts About Newspapers, 1998. Newspaper Association
of America.
TV Basics, 1998. Television Bureau of Advertising.
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