The average Sunday edition reader spent about 70 minutes reading the paper. Daily readers read their papers on average 40 minutes during weekdays and one hour on Saturdays.

So despite the rise of fast-news, and conventional wisdom pointing to large decreases in time spent reading the paper, British readers are still fervent users of the print product.

Granted, there are wide variations from one paper to the next. The Sunday Times reader spent 102 minutes reading the paper, whereas the Daily Star Sunday reader only spent 34 minutes on average with the paper.

As many newsrooms are in the process of integration, there have been mounting tensions recently as to whether the Sunday titles should be merged with the daily editions (which hasn’t been the case so far due to the traditional profitability of the weekend edition).

Observer (Sunday sister title of the Guardian) editor Roger Alston and Patience Wheatcroft, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, both recently resigned following talks of the integration of the daily and Sunday editions.

In any case, this survey should come as good news for the newspaper industry (and advertisers): though readers may be harder to get on paper, those who do read it are valuable customers.

“So print is not dead. Those who buy their newspapers give them a pretty thorough read,” commented Philip Stone, Follow the Media.

Source: Follow the Media – FT.com through paidcontent.co.uk