Changing Readers: A Demographic Warning to APME, 1999
This is a set of excerpts from a talk given by Hazel Reinhardt at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis. Reinhardt was president of Hazel Reinhardt Consulting Services and the former Minnesota state demographer, and her subject was the one part of the newspaper business that could be forecast with confidence. The document notes that copies of her slides were provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Media Management Center, and that the boldface in the transcript was added by Kees.
Her opening argument was that demographics, unlike almost everything else the industry worried about, were not a matter of speculation.
The numbers I’m going to show you for the next 10 years, outside of some major catastrophe, are the numbers that will be realized in the United States. There is almost nothing we can imagine that will happen to change that.
The readership numbers were the sobering part. Weekday readership had fallen from 78 percent of adults in 1970 to 59 percent; Sunday had barely moved, from 72 percent to 69 percent. Education and age were the two powerful predictors — 71 percent of college graduates read on a typical weekday versus 40 percent of those with less than a high school education, and 71 percent of adults 65 and older versus 45 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Broken into generations, the pattern was unmistakable: Pre-boomers at 70 percent, Baby Boomers at 58 percent, Generation X at 47 percent.
It’s a mystery to me that we could have known about this for so long but seemed to not want to talk about it: Each generation of younger people is reading less or less frequently.
From there she walked the audience through four population changes — an aging population, growing racial and ethnic diversity, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the concentration of population in certain regions and metros. She spent the most time on aging: Boomers were then 42 and 43, not 50; fertility was low; the number of Americans over 100 was projected to grow from roughly 37,000 in 1990 to about 137,000 in 2010 and 850,000 by 2050. Households with children would not grow; empty nesters would. Editors who had built their sections around “what’s of interest to families” were going to need another hook.
The hinge of the whole talk was Generation Y, which contributed only 15 million adults in 1998 but would add 65 million by 2010 — 29 percent of all adults. Everything depended on how that generation behaved.
If Generation Y reads at the same level as Generation X, overall daily readership will be below 50 percent by 2010 — 45 percent by 2015. Following that train of logic, the last American reading a newspaper would be observed in 2078.
Reinhardt offered a reason for hope — surveys showed Generation Y as more optimistic, more community-minded, more involved than Generation X — and then framed the challenge as a question the room had a very short window to answer:
The challenge to newspapers is how and what do we need to do to make a larger proportion of them newspaper readers than Generation X?
She also dismissed the industry’s favorite consolation, that people pick up the habit as they age. Asked exactly that in the Q&A, she was blunt:
If you did not read a newspaper when you were 35 and you did not read one when you were 45, why would you suddenly take it up at 55 or 65? You have established patterns.
You have a few safe years. Do not be lulled. You have a few years when you have the Boomers and Pre-boomers who are big readers with you. The future is whether you can get Generation Y.
Reading this in 2026, the arithmetic has long since resolved itself, and not in the direction the hopeful reading allowed for. What stands out now is not the forecast but the framing: Reinhardt was telling a room full of editors that the crucial period was the next five to 10 years, and that working on it that day was “none too soon.” Those were the same years the industry spent arguing about what to put on its websites. The demographic clock she described was running the entire time.