Pace of life up; newspapers down

Yet another possible cause of the decline of newspaper circulation emerged yesterday with the news that the pace of life in cities has increased dramatically (Metro) since the early 1990s.

Declining print circulations in the developed world are commonly attributed to a switch of attention to the web (a false correlation, of course, since the decline has been ongoing since the Second World War and the web has existed for perhaps a quarter of that period.) Because circulations are falling fastest in urban areas, and urban areas have been fastest to adopt first domestic Internet and now broadband, it is easy to correlate (Dadblog) web adoption with newsprint abandonment.

The new study on the rising pace of life in cities gives us another possible correlation. The transformation of newspapers themselves in cities over the past decade seems only to underline the point - urban commuter freesheets are consciously designed to meet the needs of time-poor city workers in a way that other newspapers are not.

Regular readers of this blog (or indeed of Buzzmachine) may recall my own pet theory for the decline of newspapers in the west and their continuing growth in e.g. China and India - the optimism gap between the developed and developing worlds. If the news for Europe and America is relative economic decline, demographic stagnation and looming environmental catastrophe it is hardly surprising that appetite is falling for news of how tomorrow will be worse than today.