Saturday, September 20, 2008

The New Yorker

According to stateofthenewsmedia.org I, as a subscriber to The New Yorker, should be earning about $78,815 per year and should be about 50.4 years old:

The New Yorker and The Atlantic sit above the big three newsweeklies in both median age and income. The median income of the New Yorker’s readership is $78,815 and the Atlantic’s is $80,012. The Atlantic has the oldest readership of all the news magazines we look at, with a median age of 51.4 years. The New Yorker’s median age is 50.4 years.

That statistic doesn't make me feel very successful; it does, however, make me feel relatively young and sprightly at a mere 46.5 years old. And I have had the suspicion, based on the advertisements in The New Yorker, that I was not in the income bracket that they had hoped I was in. Sorry to disappoint them, but I'm currently not in the market for a Rolex watch or an Infiniti SUV.
Another interesting fact from the above referenced web site concerns the number of people who buy and read The New Yorker. I was surprised to learn that a mere 1.062 million people find The New Yorker as enlightening and informative as I. In a country of more than 300 million people that is not an encouraging number. Surely, based on the popularity of television, the cable news outlets enjoy a far larger audience than one of the least read news weeklies.
Of course I must pick Bill O'Reilly to compare to the meager circulation numbers of The New Yorker. One would think, based on the bragging that O'Reilly does, that his audience would number in the tens of millions. According to stateofthenewsmedia.org referencing Nielsen Media Research, O'Reilly averages 2.3 million viewers per show. That is more than twice the circulation of The New Yorker, but it does not represent the size audience one would expect the more popular news medium to have in relation to a weekly news magazine.
So now I am left to wonder where among the multiple sources of news the majority of non-commited voters will look in order to make their decision for president this November. Though I get my news from many sources, I read The New Yorker every week and monitor The O'Reilly Factor from time to time. I already know how I am going to vote. I read The New Yorker partly to buttress my long ago established political preferences and I watch O'Reilly simply to see what the "other side" is up to. I suspect that most of the voters who are "up for grabs" in this or any election are like me in that they already prefer one candidate over the other; unlike me, however, they may not have a strong party loyalty and must therefore rely on a multitude of media sources to help them decide. I think they should just read The New Yorker.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh golly ... and I am an Atlantic reader.

Hockanum Monitor said...

The Atlantic is a fine ocean. The magazine by the same name is also fine but it offers up much less seafood.

Mike said...

Bill O'Reilly is the embodiment of the right: ignorant, selfish, untruthful, and rude. There are always exceptions of course.