No sooner had the New Mexico Independent published a commentary I wrote Tuesday about the high school kids I teach at Atrisco Heritage Academy not being exposed to news, when I got an alert from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. It was about the center’s biennial report on news consumpiton on Sunday. Here’s what Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher said about the report:

"Findings on TV news and online-only news produced a few surprises, but on the newspaper front the indications were mainly negative. And it wasn’t just bad news for the print side, newspapers’ online products didn’t do much better. Namely: while more young people are indeed reading newspapers online, their total readership, print and Web combined, has not grown in two years.

This survey was conducted by telephone from April 30 to June 1 among 3,612 adults nationwide.

Looking first at print, Pew reveals, “This year for the first time in roughly 15 years of asking the question, fewer than half of all Americans report reading a daily newspaper on a regular basis. Only 46 percent say they read the paper regularly – this number is down from 52 percent in 2006 and was as high as 71 percent in 1992. In a similar vein, fewer now report having read a newspaper ‘yesterday,’ a more reliable measure of newspaper readership. Only 34 percent say they read a newspaper yesterday, down from 40 percent in 2006.

“The falloff in readership over the past two years has occurred across the board – men and women, whites and blacks, college graduates and those who never attended college are all reading the newspaper at lower rates than in 2006. Age continues to be strongly correlated with newspaper readership….Currently, only 15 percent of those younger than 25 report having read a newspaper yesterday. Among those ages 25 to 34, 24 percent read a newspaper yesterday. This compares with roughly half (46 percent) of those 50 and older.”

On the other hand: “The audience for online newspapers has grown modestly since 2006. In the current survey, 13 percent say they read the web version of a newspaper yesterday, or both the print and online versions, up from 9 percent two years ago. Yet that increase has not made up for the steep loss in print readership (from 34 percent to 25 percent).

“Still, online newspapers are gaining readers, especially among people ages 25 to 34. Among people in this age group who read a newspaper yesterday, fully 16 percent report having read the paper online; slightly fewer (12 percent) say they read the paper version.

"The proportion of this age group reporting it read an online newspaper yesterday has doubled – from 9 percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2008." But here’s the kicker: "Even so, total newspaper readership among those ages 25 to 34 has not increased over the past two years."

Good news for the Alibi. The one newspaper bright spot when it comes to readership is in the weeklies market. Who knew? Pew says, "At a time when daily newspapers are losing readers, the audience for local weekly community newspapers has remained relatively stable. Currently, 33 percent say they read such newspapers regularly, about the same as in 2006 (35 percent) and 2004 (36 percent)."