U.S. newspapers may be able to use the Internet to solve a big problem facing the industry -- the a chronic shrinkage in the number of young, relatively high-spending readers sought after by advertisers, a study suggests.

Online newspaper site users are younger than both print readers and other web users, says the study commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America, and they are also considerably more likely to have purchased online than the general web audience.

While half of online users in the survey purchased online in the past six months, nearly 80 percent of online newspaper website users did, reported the study by MORI Research of Minneapolis, Minn. The items most commonly purchased were books, air and hotel reservations, clothing and music.

Online newspaper users tend to be younger, have higher incomes and are better educated than other Internet users, says Rusty Coats, MORI.s new-media director, who spoke July 14 at a newspaper-industry conference in Denver. And compared to online audiences in general, online newspaper readers spend more hours and dollars online.

Losing at night to Yahoo/AOL?
Papers are losing out to Yahoo! and AOL when it comes to satisfying most users. demand for online entertainment information, the survey found. A feature highly sought by the survey respondents was an online calendar of scheduled entertainment events.

Unlike the web generally, newspaper web sites experience their strongest traffic during the daylight hours, and fall off substantially in the evening, the study found. As a result, Coats recommend that newspaper websites change their look and focus based upon the time of day, to emphasize entertainment information and .chat. services during the evening hours.

Perhaps they believe online newspapers are a daytime habit with no place in their relaxed, evening schedules,. Coats says in the study. .Changing that perception could gain online newspapers a large and lucrative audience of already-online users.

What they read: Weather, news, sports
The MORI study found that after e-mail, national/world news, local news and sports scores and information were the top three reasons people use the Internet, and only half of general online users surveyed said they ever seek out local news or entertainment information.

The newspaper site users show little interest in audio, video or other .interactive. features such as forums or online discussions, the study also found. Of all users survey, checking weather was the biggest reason for going online, followed by information about schools and entertainment.

About 25 percent of the users of a typical online newspaper website come from outside the newspapers' traditional readership area, the survey found as high as 52 percent in one market. Such out-of-market readers are not considered by some observers to be useful to a newspaper.s local advertisers, and some websites have as a result begun considering charging access fees to service those readers.

Demographic details
About one-fourth of online newspaper readers have household income of more than $100,000 compared with 17 percent of general online users, the study found. Online newspaper readers also tend to be more educated, the study found. It said fifty-one percent are college graduates, compared with 42 percent of general users.

Forty-three percent of online readers said they were under age 35 (and 11 percent said they were under 18-25), the study found. The online newspaper readers were also about 50 percent more likely than general users to have been online for more than four years and are somewhat more frequent online users, too.

MORI surveyed 2,000 online consumers by telephone nationally, and also fielded online surveys from about 12,000 users at eight online newspaper websites of varying sizes and locations.

Link to study cover sheet: http://www.naa.org/feds/onlineresource/consumeronline.cfm
Link to order page: http://www.naa.org/artpage.cfm?AID=4393&SID=1158
Link to study itself: http://www.digitaledge.org/pdf/2002_Online_Consumer_Study.pdf
Link to slides taken from the study: http://www.digitaledge.org/pdf/MORI_Consumer_Study_Slides.ppt