State of the News Media 2007

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, a non-political, nonpartisan research institute that is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington,. today released the State of the News Media 2007–its fourth annual report.

You can read an overview of the report on our web site or go to the lenghty online report

You also may want to take a look at Facts About Newspapers, published by the Newspaper Association of America.

So you will get an idea of how times have changed we are reprinting the association’s statistics that were published in the June/July 1993 issue of Sidebar–just 13 years ago. The statistics for 2005, the latest from NAA, are inserted in brackets
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The 1994 edition of Facts About Newspapers, published by the Newspaper Association of America, presents a statistical portrait of the U.S. newspaper industry. Here are some highlights:
+ More than 114.7 million American adults (61.7 percent) read a daily newspaper on an average weekday in 1993. [down to 51 per cent]
+ U.S. newspapers received the greatest percentage of all advertising expenditures in1993 - 23.1 percent, as compared with 22.2 percent for television, 19.9 percent for direct mail and 6.8 percent for radio. [down to 15 per cent]
+ More than 7.4 million tons of V.S. newsprint - 58 percent of all U.S. newsprint - were recycled in 1993, up from 36 percent in 1988. [increased to 9.7 million tons]
+ There were 1,556 U.S. daily newspapers in 1993, down from 1,570 in 1992.
[down to 1,452]
+ Newspaper employment increased to 451,700 in 1993, from 451,300 in 1992.
[down to 375.600]

[Circulation down 2.6 per cent daily and 3.1 per cent on Sunday. Until 2004 losses were less than 1 per cent[]