Is print still king? Has online made a move? Updating a controversial post

A year ago, in a Nieman Journalism Lab post that garnered 88 comments and still has viral life out there, I maintained that just three percent of newspaper content consumption happens online; the rest of it happens the old fashioned way, by people reading ink on dead trees. Given the continuing attention being paid to that conclusion (it was cited just last month by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, in testimony to the Federal Trade Commission), let’s revisit the numbers and see whether anything has changed.

With updates or improved data on at least some of the numbers, the general conclusions still hold: U.S. newspapers have not pushed much of their audience to their websites, nor have they followed the migration of their readership to the web. Their combined print and online readership metrics, whether measured in pageviews or in time spent, show that there’s been significant attrition since last year in the total audience for newspaper content, and that the fraction of that audience consuming newspaper content online remains in the low-to-mid single digits.

Continue reading at Nieman Journalism Lab.