The survey span across two months, from October 8 through December 7 2006, after the World Editors Forum sent an email to its database of 6,000 editors There were 480 responses and 45 were discarded, based on the fact that the respondent didn’t qualify as a senior news executive.

So who were the respondents?

435 senior news executives from around the world answered the Newsroom Barometer (there are 10,000 daily newspapers worldwide). These included editors-in-chief (45%), managing editors (17%) and other types of news executives across the board.

Most of them were over 50 years of age (40%), but this means that younger editors and news executives were also represented.

For this first edition of the Newsroom Barometer, the geographic distribution of respondents was less representative of worldwide views, with 42% coming from Western Europe, 14% from Asia and 9% from North America, but this gave an in-depth view of the newspaper market in the ‘Old World’.

Respondents came from different and representative types of newspapers: there was an almost equal divide between international / national papers (46%) and regional / local ones (54%), which translated into these proportions for print circulation (40% below 50,000 daily copies) and website traffic (40% below 50,000 unique visitors per day).

There was a perfect divide between newspapers’ circulation that had either increased or decreased, which roughly corresponds to the bipolar trends between Western Europe and North America versus Asia.


For the full Newsroom Barometer results and commentary plus the complete, analytical guide to the monumental transformations taking place in the newspaper industry, please consult the print or PDF version of Trends in Newsrooms 2007 (http://www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php), released 27th March 2007. From free papers to e-papers, citizen journalism to social media and integrated newsrooms to Internet aggregators, it has everything you need to know to direct your paper towards a multimedia future.

Read part 1 – Nobody has killed the newspaper
Read part 2 - How editors view emerging forms of journalism (free papers, citizen journalism, online journalism and more)
Read part 3 – How editors view their newspaper in 10 years
Read part 4 – Newsroom priorities, threats to editorial independence
Read part 5 – Who participated in the Newsroom Barometer?
Read part 6 – Newsroom Barometer: analysis by John Zogby and comment by Jeff Jarvis