• by David Kaplan , June 27, 2005

The competition between online and print for readers is more of a symbiosis when it comes to newspapers, a study released last week by marketing data consultant Scarborough Research found.

For the report, Scarborough combined the audience of traditional printed newspapers with the audience of their Web sites, and found that a significant number of people only read the Web versions of newspapers. Web audiences also are younger, overall, than readers of the printed version.

For example, the printed version of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reaches, on average, 51 percent of adults in the Atlanta local market, but when the AJC.com and AccessAtlanta.com Web audience is included, that average increases to 56 percent--a 10 percent gain, which translates to almost 223,000 readers.

In addition, more than 38 percent of the AJC.com and AccessAtlanta.com audience is between the ages of 18 and 34, compared to 28 percent of the readers of the printed newspaper.