| 摘要 | The publishing industry is in distress. Newspaper subscriptions are down, so is the number of daily newspapers. Magazines and books are also suffering neglect. Why has this happened—and should anyone other than stockholders in publishing enterprises care?
Newspaper circulation peaked in 1984 at 63.3 million, falling to 54.6 million by 2004. Measured against population, the decline has been going on since the early 1960s. The ratio of circulation to population was 0.3 in 1970, down to 0.19 in 2004. Decline in newspaper readership has been dramatic, from 77.6% of the adult population in 1970 to 51.6% in 2005. The largest decline, roughly 50%, was for the youngest age groups: 18-24 and 25-34. Readership is expected to continue falling as these groups move up in years. For 18-24 year olds, the first big decline came in the 1970s, shortly after a sharp drop in high school senior test scores. That may have reflected the influence of greater TV viewing. Another large decline occurred in the 1990s, influenced by the growth in PCs and internet use.
Circulation trends relative to population understate the decline. The average size of households has shrunk. While adult population grew by 64 percent between 1970 and 2005, the number of households grew by 78 percent. Declining circulation means loss of revenues. The almost inevitable outcome is staff cutbacks and reduced news coverage.
The proportion of the adult population with a high school degree rose from 55.2% to 85.2% between 1970 and 2005, and those with a college education from 11.0% to 27.6%, so if you think that newspaper readership follows education, you would expect it to increase. But it has declined for every level of education. Applying the 1970 readership rates by education to the 2005 adult population raises the average readership rate from 51.6% to 70.8%.
Can we claim that many are reading on the web rather than subscribing to newspapers? Yes, but it’s not the whole story. The decline in reading started long before there was much on the web, or many people on the web. As recently as 1997, only 18.6% of households had an internet connection.
Magazines are likewise in trouble. Paid circulation for magazines covered by the Audit Bureau of Circulation peaked in 2000 at 379 million; dropping to 362 million by 2005, in spite of increasing population, higher incomes, and educational attainment. I suspect that the greatest decline is in the magazines that offer the most in terms of knowledge and thoughtful analysis. My evidence includes the increasingly frequent invitations to accept a free copy, a discounted subscription to renowned magazines, and offers of a second subscription free as a reward for renewing my own.
The recent trend in number of new books sold is down. From a readership point of view, used books count too. They are sold largely through informal channels, for which there are no reliable data, and it is encouraging to see thriving markets for used books emerge at Amazon.com and elsewhere. But a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, found a considerable decline in the proportion of the adult population that reads literature, from 56.9% in 1982 to 54.0% in 1992 and 46.7% in 2002. Reading declined for every level of education and every age group, but most, 28% and 23%, for the youngest age groups, 18-24 and 25-34.
One reason adults are reading less is that an increasing number of them are unable to do so. The National Center for Education Statistics conducted surveys of adult literacy in 1992 and 2003. It tested ability to read prose, documents, and quantitative materials, such as graphs, charts, and tables. At every level of educational attainment, from elementary school through college, prose and document literacy has fallen; only the increase in educational attainment has prevented a significant drop in average literacy. (For quantitative there was no change.) NCES’s “A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century” defines three levels of literacy: basic, intermediate, and proficient. In 2003, 13% of high school graduates were illiterate, up from 11% in 1992, and another 39% (up from 37%) were reading only at the basic level. The proportion of college graduates meeting its proficiency standard in reading dropped from 40% to 31%. Nearly half of the adult population reads at the elementary school level. These numbers lend credibility to claims that literacy was higher half a century earlier, and so was the quality of high school and college graduates. Test scores of draftees in the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam show a decline in literacy over time.
If vocabulary is limited, publications adapt. Textbooks on all subjects have been simplified considerably compared to those used a couple of generations ago. What of newspapers and magazines? I suspect that they also are more limited in their lexicon than in the past, and that the distribution of readership has shifted to these publications which have the least to offer in that regard. The process is self-reinforcing. Flipping through recent issues of several venerable mass market magazines, I get the impression that they contain more entertainment and less information; more advertisement and photos than they did forty years ago.
The decline in reading amounts to a decline in learning and knowledge. The vocabulary acquired through normal everyday conversation is limited. The much greater vocabulary of educated adults is learned mainly through reading. As to knowledge, one can learn from fiction, but not in a coherent systematic manner. Reading a nonfiction book is a less passive undertaking than reading anything else, or obtaining information from TV, radio, or the web. The reader can hop, skip, reread; use the table of contents, the index; start with the summary or conclusion.
High level literacy across a broad spectrum of subject matter requires wider knowledge than the average student acquires in primary and secondary public schools. Knowledge has declined, in history, geography, math and sciences, language, even most social “sciences.” How do we know? The decline in adult literacy and reading; in SAT and other tests for high school graduates, the decline in GREs taken by college seniors thinking of graduate studies; the pauperization of the textbooks from which students learn. Alternative means of learning clearly have not compensated for the decline in reading.
There are cognitive differences between readers and nonreaders, and between good and poor readers. Reading and writing are more abstract, objective, and analytical than oral communication. Readers display a greater range and complexity of expression. Cognitive gains include ability to generalize instead of thinking only in particulars, to use analogy, to classify according to common abstract properties. Such abilities are found with much lower frequency among illiterates.
The philosophy prevailing in public schools has helped undermine the quest for knowledge—to rebuild literacy, we must reverse it. Two generations have been taught that they have a right to their own opinion without regard to their mastery of the subject; that all opinions are of equal value. This assumption underlies the popularity of public opinion polls as means of settling matters of fact and logic. No one told them that such an opinion is worth somewhere between a plugged nickel and a tinker’s damn. So why do one’s homework? Why read, why think?
Charles T. Stewart, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Economics at George Washington University. |
