There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration here.
1. The average age in the DR is only 21. Reading the newspaper is not a top priority among 20-somethings anywhere in the world. Newspaper readership has been declining steadily over the years on a global scale and there are many studies that back this up, do a search if you need to "see" prior to "believe".
2. A large proportion of the population, perhaps over half, is under the age of 20. The reasoning behind this one ties with #1.
3. On average, how many people read one newspaper? Chances are that one newspaper is not exclusively read by one person, but rather by several people. All sort of things could explain this phenomenon. Either someone buys the paper and then, once he finishes, passes the paper to someone else or leaves it in a place where someone else picks it up or throws the paper in the garbage and someone takes it out and reads it. Also, in shops and other centers of socialization, a single newspaper may be read by tens of individuals.
Assuming that on average one newspaper is read by at least 5 people, that's 500,000 people who read newspapers. Once you take into consideration that half of the population may be underage (that leaves 4.5 million adult individuals), that there are about 2 million households in the entire country (hence, that leaves an average of 2.25 adults per household), then things may become a little clearer.
If each newspaper is read by at least 5 adults, that amounts to 500,000 adults reading newspapers, then that means that potentially 25%, on average, of households have at least one adult that reads a newspaper.
This is all speculative, but with an inherent lack of data available, we have to work with something. Also, there are many other factors that I ignored in such assessment, including illiteracy rates, the percentage of urban/rural households, etc. Such additional factors influences the pool of literate with potential access to a newspaper population and what percentage of such actually does read the paper, etc. It also ignores other forms of receiving news, such as television, which according to some studies is found in 90% of Dominican homes; the radio which has traditionally been much more widespread than television, the internet which is gaining momentum among the younger generations, etc.
In order for this speculative data to be meaningful, it would need more reliable data, but also to be compared with other countries in order to get a relative sense of how good or bad this is.
-NALs