Who reads newspapers?

Newspapers will wither and perhaps die, unless they become online media platforms, according to the next generation of journalists.
More than 200 first year journalism students this year took part in an online survey of their news reading habits conducted by QUT Journalism Professor, Alan Knight. More than 90% of the respondents were aged under twenty one.
Many of these want-to-be journalists don't read newspapers. More than sixty percent read a printed newspaper once a week or less. Yet 95 percent said they enjoyed keeping up with news.
Their preferred source of news was broadcast on television, particularly commercial television, with at least half watching television news at least once a day.
Online News was their next preferred source with students nominating Google,, Ninemsn and then other mainstream journalism sites. Facebook, specialist websites and Wikipedia followed.
The results confirmed educators' suspicions. Even journalism students are not reading newspapers.
This poses a greater threat to the printed press than the global economic cirisis or the loss of advertising revenue to the web.
If the journalists of the future don't want to read newspapers, who will?
The next stage of the study will involve focus groups of students discussing how news can be made more interesting and attractive to netizens. Parallel studies are being conducted in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong. and otehr international centres.

Audio: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/bst_20090311_0824.mp3