From Print In the Mix:

A new National Newspaper Association (NNA) survey finds that 81% of respondents read a local weekly paper each week.  NNA is the national organization for community newspapers (often referred to as "weeklies").

• Nearly half (47%) say they read the newspaper as much for the ads as for the news.

• 73% read "most or all of it," and those readers spend an average of 40 minutes with the paper.

• Readers, on average, share their paper with 2.36 additional readers.

• Nearly 40% keep their community newspaper more than a week.

• Three-quarters of readers read local news "often to very often" in their community newspaper, while 53% say they never read local news online.  Only 12% say they read local news "often to very often" online.
  
  
• Among those going online for local news, 63% find it on the local newspaper's website, compared to 17% for sites such as Google, and 12% from the website of a local TV station.

• 30% of respondents do not have home Internet access.

   Full story here
  

...by creating a product fewer people want to buy. Newsprint consumption continues to fall:

As reported in Editor and Publisher: "Total newsprint consumption in the U.S. plummeted 27.1% year-over-year in August, exceeding the decline year-to-date low of 25.6%, according to data released by the Pulp and Paper Products Council (PPPC)."

According to a survey by AdMob and ComScore, IPhone users are 58% more likely to view news via web access on their phones than they are to read the newspaper. They are also 53% more likely to read magazines via their mobile device than read the print version. 

If you (being a person in the print industry) are still wondering whether or not free content via the web is a good idea this should show you once and for all that the future lies in protecting the content that you pay to create and delivering it via print and an e-reader format, like the Kindle or Sony Reader. As we have spoken about before in this blog, the beauty of the e-reader format is that the producer of content controls access.

Here is more information from the survey, so you can draw your own conclusions. Please tell us if you disagree.