Readership Numbers Another Mixed Bag

After a busy spring/summer at PTA and some much-needed family time, I have come back to the blog to re-dedicate myself to exploring what readership means in this day and age. With audiences fracturing and media proliferating, the evolution of media consumptions moves pretty fast. You keep up or you wither away. Guess I don't want to wither.

So I looked at the latest readership figures from GfK MRI. The headlines look good. Magazine readership remains stable. Overall readership rose a percent.

Given the difficulties in growing mass media readership, steady or stable is good. As many propose, what would be helpful is if these figures could be combined with online readership of these same titles.

PTA hopes to achieve this kind of synergy when it releases its first truly digital edition of Our Children, the National PTA magazine. It's in the planning stages for this fall, so anything could happen. But, hopefully, this will be an initiative that can educate all of us.