An interesting study of media usage among 8-18 year olds.
Note particularly chart #27. The amount of time spent reading books has actually increased since 1999…newspapers and magazines, not so much. Total time spent on all print media combined, though, doesn’t come anywhere close to the time spent watching TV.
Execs in the periodicals industry are desperately hoping that iPad and similar devices will save them. I think that many if not most of them are going to be disappointed in this hope.
I don’t think time spent consuming a particular media form tells us much about its importance or its economic viability. There is often an inverse correlation between profit margins and the time people spend consuming the media. TV has much lower rate of return than do video games even though people spend more time watching TV.
The influence that media has on people’s thinking has more to do with the density of the medium than time invested in it. I can read several dozens text websites in the same half hour it takes to watch the news and I will get a lot more information.
Periodicals differently have a bleak future in front of them. They used to fill the gap between daily (or hourly) newspapers and books. Now that function is better served by websites.