Prompted by the lack of use and gratification studies that have concerned themselves with an examination of newspaper-related behaviors such as subscribing versus not subscribing, buying single copies versus not reading at all, and weekday versus Sunday newspaper readership, a study conducted a telephone survey of 543 persons to determine whether the concepts of surveillance, diversion, and interaction could prove useful in explaining such newspaper readership behaviors. Questions were asked concerning demographics, media usage, and reactions to a selection of use and gratification statements. In addition, three idiosyncratic statements were added to permit the emergence of other statement groupings. The data analysis revealed that subscribers who read both weekday and Sunday newspapers tended to have a strong generalized orientation toward surveillance of the environment, while nonreaders tended to view the newspaper as a diversion to pass time. Single copy readers used weekday newspapers as an interaction tool for finding materials to talk about, while Sunday newspaper single copy readers were more oriented toward the surveillance notion of understanding what is going on. The differences in the orientations of single copy readers helped to account for differences between weekday and Sunday circulation for local newspapers. (HOD)