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TheBuzz Erika Engle |
World Wide Web
takes on newspapers’
web pressesIf you're holding this column in your hands, you belong to a better-educated but lower paid group of readers, according to a new survey.
You're also likely to be a little more mature. OK, older, according to the 2003 SMS Hawaii Market Study.
The group that you're being compared to reads this and other publications online.
SMS surveyed nearly 2,500 Hawaii adults and found that among hard-copy readers, the average household income is $61,037, the average age is 48, the percentage with a basic-or-better college degree is 88 percent, and that 56 percent are employed.
Among Web readers, the average salary is $69,461, average age 41, 73 percent have a college degree or better, and 70 percent are employed. Perhaps a reflection of all the online newspaper reading at work.
"Too many people assume that the Web is very, very powerful and is taking over the world," said SMS Chairman Hersh Singer. "Other groups of people think that the Web is doing nothing."
Time to recall those grade-school-era Venn diagrams or other graphing system your math-challenged columnist has long since forgotten.
Seventy-nine percent of Hawaii's adults read a local daily paper, weekly paper or monthly magazine. Of that universe, 10 percent of readers access local publications through Web sites, but 12 percent of hard-copy readers like yourself also check the Web sites of your publications of choice.
In Hawaii, 86 percent of online readers also pick up a printed copy.
"All those people are not new people," Singer said. SMS estimates that fewer than 13,000 people are Web-only readers, meaning publications get a 1.7 percent increase in readership by being on the Internet.
"That may be an opportunity for the local publications to increase their usage," he said.
To Buck Laird, president of Laird Christianson Harris Advertising Inc., increasing readership may be a tangential result of a newspaper having a Web site but that shouldn't be the overall mission.
"I think it should be to beat the socks off your competitor," he said.
The data confirms Laird's opinion that publications' online editions are a modern equivalent of photocopying newspaper articles to share with colleagues.
Newspapers with an online presence are "providing better, more well-rounded service to their subscribers and users. I would expect my newspaper to have that," Laird said.
The No. 2 reason for picking up a newspaper is its advertising content, which is largely missing from online editions, said AdWorks Inc. President Darrel Kloninger.
"Hard copies are much more useful to people than Web (editions)," he said. Either way, "if you don't read newspapers in either a hard-copy or electronic format, you're underinformed ... not just underinformed in an elitist, intellectual or academic way. You're underinformed whether it's the comic strips or the latest deal at Caesar's Cleaners or what's happening with political things, the bus strike or whatever," Kloninger said.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin. Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210, Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached at: eengle@starbulletin.com
