According to Carl Howe, an influential U.S. industry analyst and founder of BlackFriars Communication, newspapers are still far from extinction, since these remain the most efficient medium for local advertising. But there will be a consolidation of brands – survival of the fittest – as newspapers compete along with radio, television, and the now booming websites and podcasts for a thinning out public attention span.
  Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter institute, is more skeptical about the newspaper industry’s future. Overall circulation may have ‘only’ dropped 2.8% (about 1.2 million readers), but the figures are misleading. Newspapers are losing a majority of readers who pay over 50% of the paper’s full price, while struggling to maintain their circulation numbers through discount offers and ‘cheap’ readership.
   And unfortunately, Edmonds doubts that online news sources can make up for the paper circulation’s losses.
   According to a Nielsen/Net Ratings study, there was an 8% increase in online readership between September 2005 and 2006. Roughly speaking, 1.9 million users visited an online newspaper daily: as a whole, the newspaper industry is losing its readership.
   Furthermore, the online user only spent an average 1.4 minutes daily perusing through the headlines. Since 2002, the average paper print reader cut by half the time he spends reading his daily (10 minutes as opposed to 20).
   What is truly happening then – what Howe points to when speaking of diminishing attention spans – is that people today devote less and less time to reading news. They seek a more time-efficient, condensed paper. For some, like newspaper consultant Juan Antonio Giner, this evolution in reading habits doesn’t mean a loss. Instead, he believes news sources should adapt to the necessity of a quick-read yet quality format.

The question now is how to adapt your newsroom to these changes in reading habits.