Newspaper Readership of
Latin American Children

Newsstand in Mexico City, Mexico
(photo credit: R. Soong)

As countries develop from labor-intensive agrarian societies into industrialized countries, literacy of their populations assume a major role in determining the rate of development.  The significant human capital is not necessarily physical numbers or work hours, but knowledge.  Such intellectual capital is transmitted and propagated through written materials, which makes reading ability and skills a sine qua non for development.

Reading is a habit that must be taught and cultivated.  Beyond the school curriculum, children should be encouraged to read about the world around them.  Of particular value are newspapers, which inform them about current happenings.  According to the 1998 Pan Latin American Kids study, 20.8% of Latin American kids between the ages of 7 and 11 years old read a weekday newspaper and 18.1% read a Sunday newspaper.  The following table provides the demographics of these children.

Newspaper Readership among Latin American kids, age 7-11

(source: Pan Latin American Kids Study 1998, Audits & Surveys Worldwide)

Newspaper readership is higher among boys than girls, and increases with age.  Newspaper readership is also correlated with the educational level of the head of household and the socio-economic level of the household, which are proxies for the availability of education resources (such as parental education and availability of books, newspapers and magazines).  None of this information should prove to be surprising to anyone.

In modern society, the greatest influence on reading behavior is television.  The medium of television has been accused of being responsible for the deterioration of reading skills in the population.  The reasons can be grouped under two hypotheses.  The displacement hypothesis posits that television viewing consumes time that would otherwise be devoted to the acquisition of reading skills and  habits.  The interference hypothesis takes three forms: (1) television cultivates audio-visual skills to the exclusion or detriment of reading skills; (2) the quick pacing of television weakens the ability to attend to the slower pace of learning to read; (3) reading while the television is on weakens attention and comprehension.

In this survey, the children were asked if they had any limits on television viewing time.  In the following table, we show these limits for the newspaper readers.  The newspaper readers view fewer television hours compared to the general population.  Of course, this is a correlational statement and does not imply cause-and-effect.

Number of daily television viewing hours and Newspaper Readership

(source: Pan Latin American Kids Study 1998, Audits & Surveys Worldwide)

The newspaper is not a single product that is used on an all-or-none basis.  Newspapers are divided clearly and  intentionally divided into multiple sections because of the recognition that people have specific interests.  The Sunday edition is especially large with all the special magazines and inserts and may weigh a kilogram in paper weight.  In the following table, we show the newspaper sections that are regularly read by the Sunday newspaper readers.  

Newspaper Sectional Readership Among Sunday Newspaper Readers between the ages of 7 and 11

(source: Pan Latin American Kids Study 1998, Audits & Surveys Worldwide)

If we conceptualize the newspaper as a suite of different sections catering to specific interests, we can naturally speak of usage segments.  That is to say, some kids will consistently read only some sections but not others.  We applied a segmentation algorithm (known as the K-means algorithm) to the newspaper sectional readership data.  This gave us three different clusters, which represent a mutually exclusive and exhaustive partitioning of the Sunday newspaper readers into three clusters (or segments), so as to minimize the differences among the clusters while maximizing the differences between clusters.  In the following table, we show which newspapers sections are being read by these clusters.

Newspaper Sectional Readership by Three Reader Clusters

(source: Pan Latin American Kids Study 1998, Audits & Surveys Worldwide)

The first reader segment is entertainment-oriented.  The second reader segment is information-oriented.  The third segment is interested only in comics and sports.  The next table gives us some idea about who these kids are in terms of their demographic characteristics.  Of special note is that the second cluster, which has the heaviest newspaper readers, consists of older boys.

Demographic Characteristics of Three Reader Segments

(source: Pan Latin American Kids Study 1998, Audits & Surveys Worldwide)

WORLD WIDE WEB REFERENCES

• Newspaper Sectional Readership About how Latin Americans between the ages of 12 and 64 read newspaper sections

PRINT REFERENCES

• George Comstock and Erica Scharrer (1999).  Television: What's On, Who's Watching, and What It Means.  Academic Press: New York.

(posted by Roland Soong on 12/20/99)

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