WIRED MAGAZINE says - More men read news online than women

[Dover]

News Sites, Where the Men Are


By Laila Weir
02:00 AM Aug. 04, 2004 PT

If you're reading this, chances are you're a man. It's not just because Wired News covers technology, the traditional domain of men. Recent surveys found that a large majority of people who read news online are male.

While the gender ratio of people who read print newspapers is about 1-to-1, 60 percent to 70 percent of the people who read the websites of the same newspapers are male. For example, 61.8 percent of NYTimes.com readers are men, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, an agency that provides research and analysis on Internet users. However, the audience of the paper version of The New York Times is roughly 50-50, according to audience reports provided by the paper.1 (Wired News' male-female ratio is about 7-to-3, in line with other technology-oriented sites). In general, the number of men reading online news is 8 percent to 13 percent higher than women, according to studies by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Whether this is a good thing depends on whom you ask. Journalists and editors say it could be a bad sign that news sites aren't paying enough attention to women. But online publishers say it could be a boon, since they can demonstrate to advertisers that they have the elusive 18- to 34-year-old male -- the most sought-after demographic in the media world -- among their readers. ...cont'd

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64439,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2