They are very, very strong. Americans buy more than 56 million newspapers every day, and an average of 2.33 people read each copy. Six out of 10 adults read a paper every day, and almost seven out of 10 read one on Sunday. Nothing else reaches so many people on a regular basis. In the past 50 years we've seen the rise of television, cable, specialty publications, direct mail and the Internet.
Some people see newspapers as frozen in time, unable or unwilling to fill new needs.
They think it's only a matter of a few years before new technology makes us irrelevant, before we lack a critical mass of readers, before we lose our bases of advertisers. They think we are dinosaurs waiting to go extinct. They are wrong. I do not, by any means, reserve my enthusiasm only for newspapers. Our online segment becomes more important by the day, and there are exciting futures ahead as well for classified publications, weekly newspapers, shoppers and alternative publications.