Wishful thinking, newspaper edition

From the wishful thinking dept. at Editor and Publisher.:

Returning to print shouldn’t be seen as taking a step back. Many readers still rely heavily on the print edition. A Pew Research Center study found that around half of newspaper readers in three U.S. metropolitan cities (Denver, Colo., Macon, Ga., and Sioux City, Iowa) only read in print.

With the saturation of news, the toxicity of online harassment, and the amount of poor Web experiences, readers will soon want to come back to print. This resurgence must take place if we want to keep print around for many more years, and publishers can accomplish that by immersing readers—not with virtual reality headsets—but with ink on their hands.

That's at the bottom of a mishmash, way-too-long piece that tries to make the case that poor woeful newspapers are being victimized again by technology, this time ad blockers (BTW, there's an easy way to get around Forbes' ad-blocking message and many other publishers').

That Pew statistic? It's a nice way of deception. Remember, it says half of all newspaper readers. It doesn't say what's happening to the overall number of newspaper readers (in other words, if there are still two newspaper readers and one reads only in print, you've met that stat -- but it's hardly a viable business model).

I'm a big fan of "newspapers" if you mean the term to refer to robust news orgs. If you mean it to refer to ink on paper, however, I'd like to introduce you to the dozens of students I interact with every semester. You know, the future higher income, higher educated readers your advertisers want. "Newspaper" is not in their daily universe.

This, of course, from the same people who have been telling themselves for years that as people age and buy houses, have kids, etc., they'll start reading newspapers -- despite every bit of solid social science research that's debunked that.

So how's that working out?