News Audiences, Decline of

Early Audiences

Lacking an audience to read and view their work, journalists have no reason to produce news content. For each mass medium, the news-consuming audience has declined since reaching a peak sometime in the twentieth century. According to the annual reports by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to decline in the 1940s, but circulation continued to rise until 1984 due to the increases in U.S. population. For television network news viewing, the peak came in 1969 when the combined audience for NBC, ABC, and CBS was about 52 million. Since then, the audience has steadily declined to about half that number. Cable news audiences, measured by the mean number of people watching over the course of a given day, rose steadily until 2003, when they too began to trend downward. Radio news is lumped in with talk show and information program listening by researchers. This audience, though harder to accurately measure, has remained relatively stable since 2000 according to Arbitron, the radio audience research company, as reported by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. As with other news media, the largest part of that audience is made up by those in the 55 to 64 and over 65 years old categories. Weekly news magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report have experienced major circulation losses that threaten their very survival.

Historically, as each new medium developed, it took a bite out of the audience for earlier media. Radio, for example, was perceived in the 1930s as a threat to newspapers as it could offer current news more frequently. Newspapers, meanwhile, were stuck with their once-a-day news cycle unless something extremely newsworthy occurred, in which case the paper might publish a special edition—an “extra.” Over time, the two media settled into comfortable niches, with newspapers focusing on more in-depth news and analysis, and radio providing more condensed versions of the news, offered more frequently. Serious news consumers might choose to listen to radio reports and to follow up with reading the more analytical version in the newspapers. Others in the audience might choose one version or the other, thus fragmenting the audience for each medium. Television, in turn, challenged radio and newspapers since its onset in 1948, while the latest and most intense challenge has come from the Internet, starting from the mid-1990s when newspapers began to appear on line in large numbers.

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