Jennie Rae Buckner, The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, presiding: Good morning. I’m the chair of the Readership Committee, and we have news this morning hot off the presses. We have major research findings of a national study on media use. ASNE partnered with our associates at NAA to fund this research, and as editors on this com-mittee, we very much wanted to make sure that ideas for editors might come from this research. We wanted to find out how newspa-pers compared with other media, and we wanted to know what read-ers see as our major strengths and weaknesses. We also wanted to know how we might leverage some of these strengths. So this, I think — I hope — will be news you can really use.

Helping share this research with you this morning are two of the re-searchers. John Bartolomeo is managing partner and co-founder of the research firm Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo. John and his company have helped many of our newspapers do local research in their mar-kets. He knows a great deal about our industry and our business. Sharon Warden is the research development manager of The Wash-ington Post. Sharon has had a long career in newspapers, including working in the newsroom and doing newsroom research for news polls. Sharon, could you start us off?

Remarks by Sharon Warden

This morning we’re going to present the results of a brand new study that is literally hot off the presses, and for which we don’t have quite all of the results yet. The study has not been analyzed, so we have a very, very brief summary if you’d like to pick it up after the presenta-tion today. You might find it interesting. It also has the name of con-tact personnel you can call to get a copy of the study when it’s released, which probably won’t be until late June.

The study is called "Leveraging Newspaper Assets." What we’re go-ing to present today are very much just the highlights of this study, which has actually been conducted in 1997. There are two main ob-jectives to this study. The primary one is to understand the competi-tive strengths and weaknesses of newspapers vis-à-vis other media and to explore what the newspaper industry can do to leverage its strengths and overcome its weaknesses, both in terms of product and communication strategies. There is a two-phase methodology to this study. The first phase was a telephone survey of just over 3,000 adults 18 years of age and older in the market place. These adults were asked when they completed the telephone survey if they would be willing to complete a booklet. We sent booklets out to folks who said "yes" and 63 percent of them returned the booklet. What we’re presenting today are the results of the telephone survey. We haven’t analyzed the booklet data yet. The study brought out several basic challenges to the newspaper industry.

We’ll cover four areas of results from the survey. One is the basic challenge of measuring what people say they’ll watch, what kind of newspapers they read, and consumer expectations of media in gen-eral. The second area is key assets gleaned from the research. The third area is the middle-ground areas where newspapers do some-what well but not as well as other media. And the fourth area is the challenges and opportunities we learned from the research.

The study shows that local weekday newspapers reach approximately 6 out of 10 adults on an average weekday. Local TV news has a sub-stantially larger audience on an average weekday reaching 7 out of 10 adults. On Sunday, local newspapers reach 7 out of 10 adults as well, and the Sunday paper commands much more audience loyalty than the weekday paper. In fact, local weekday papers would be less missed than local TV news, but Sunday papers would be missed more than both. We also found from the study that Internet usage is relatively low in the United States.

Who uses various weekday media regularly? The study shows that local television news enjoys its greatest strengths among those at the lower socioeconomic levels. Use of newspaper and TV news in-creases with age and socioeconomic status. However, local TV news leads among all age groups. Among the most affluent and best edu-cated, newspapers and television have essentially equal reach. To-day’s penetration patterns, however, represent declines across all educational segments compared to 20 years ago. These numbers tell the story. As age increases, regular readership of newspapers and viewership of local, world and national TV news goes up, while radio shows a bit of a mixed pattern. But the inverse is true for Internet use, which has only 8 percent of adults 18 to 34 years of age and 3 per-cent of those 65 years of age and older.

Furthermore, as education and income increase, daily newspaper readership, world and national TV news viewership, Internet viewing for news, and radio news listening increase, but there is an inverse relationship for local TV news.

Another predictor we found from the study for weekday readership is community ties. Those with greater ties to their community and those with a strong sense of identification with their area are more likely to read a weekday newspaper. About 57 percent of regular readers have lived in a community more than 10 years; 56 percent of those with strong sense of identification are regular readers, and, of course, something we’ve known for years, homeowners are more likely to be regular readers than renters.

Now, John is going to present the assets and opportunities we’ve learned from this study.

Remarks by John Bartolomeo

Thank you, Sharon, and good morning to you all. As Sharon and Jen-nie have indicated, the primary objective of the study is to come to an understanding of what our greatest competitive strengths and relative weaknesses are. In reviewing some of the audience figures that Sharon has just gone through, you already see one of our major as-sets — the Sunday product tends to be a blockbuster.

However, the heart of the study involved gathering consumer percep-tions and experiences with the various media to see how we stack up against them and against consumer expectations. There are seven areas I’d like to review with you this morning. The first two are areas in which we have a clear competitive strength. They pertain to local coverage as well as utility. The remaining five are more equivocal ar-eas. They are battleground areas where we are losing against the competition, losing against consumer expectations, or losing against both.

Let’s take them one at a time. Asset number one, as I indicated, is the local franchise, and when I say the local franchise, I mean news cov-erage as well as advertising content that has a strong local orienta-tion. Now, even though this is an area of major competitive strength and a clear asset for the industry, that doesn’t mean that the public believes our performance is flawless. In fact, there are two areas where there is shortfall against public expectations. One of them per-tains to community news, and the second, the bigger of the two, has to do with the degree to which we are perceived to solve community problems.

Some of the principal local news coverage topics we investigated in the survey are entertainment, government, and so forth. For every one of these important local topics, newspapers do better than other media and, in many instances, by a considerable margin. If we turn to two areas that have a local orientation when it comes to advertising, newspapers do clearly better than other media, and when it comes to groceries, even more substantially.

However, as I mentioned a minute ago, though we do well against other media, we get more of a mixed picture when we compare our-selves to what consumers expect of us. For a lot of the specific news topics, we win against expectations. So it is a victory, but there is shortfall in consumer expectation, the first having to do with problem-solving community coverage and the second having to do with com-munity news. The first one is interesting because it has a double di-mension to it. It represents local news, but it also has a utility component to it — what you can do to help me in my day-to-day life, what you can do to help my community.

That’s really a lead-in to the second asset area we discovered: utility. The utility component has two aspects to it: local news coverage and advertising. But it has more to do with advertising content, and that’s important to keep in mind.

Just as with local coverage, despite the fact that utility is an area where we have clear assets, it’s not an unmitigated positive. There is one underperforming area that is the general conclusion the public draws about how helpful we are in their day-to-day lives. When we asked them very specific questions that pertain to utility, we tended to win, and on most of them we tended to win big. When we asked them to draw the general conclusion about helpfulness in their day-to-day lives, it revealed a more equivocal picture. For utility regarding adver-tising, saving time, and saving money, we do significantly better than other media, and, in the case of saving money, much, much better. For utility items that have more to do with news content, TV and en-tertainment listings, we do pretty well against other media. In fact, the gaps are pretty large. But for the overall conclusion about how helpful we are day by day, you see a win for newspapers, but it’s not all that substantial a win. When we see gaps like this between the general and the specific, it often means there is a need for aggressive com-munications to help the public draw the connecting lines between the dots. These represent two clear assets, even if they are not flawless assets for newspapers.

The rest of the study provides more of a mixed picture, however, of how we stand against competitive media. These are battleground topics. The first two I’d like to talk about relate to relevance and the degree to which we impart understanding and perspective to our readers, and second — and related to that — the degree to which we are perceived to engage our readers. When it comes to the first of these, consumer expectations are significantly undermet and we get a mixed picture against other media. We tend to be equal to TV overall; we do a little better than radio; but we don’t do nearly as well as magazines.

When we come to how well we do regarding reader engagement, again consumer expectations tend to be undermet. When we com-pare ourselves with other media, we generally don’t do as well as they do, but the gap between us and them isn’t so great that we can’t improve and pre-empt them.

Some items that relate to relevance to readers and imparting under-standing to readers are what the story discusses, is it interesting, does it make the reader think, does it investigate important issues. In every single case there is a significant gap when we compare expec-tations to our performance. And the general pattern that emerges when we compare with other media is no clear winner. On one or two we tie; on most we are behind, but we are behind by a little, clearly an area of greater need. People want more understanding, and when we look at our position compared to other media, we don’t do as well as we would like, but the gap is not so great that we can’t pre-empt them.

Similarly, when it comes to reader engagement, except for sparking emotions, there tends to be a gap against expectations. When we compare ourselves to other media, we tend to fall behind. We fall be-hind significantly for sparking emotions, but that’s somewhat less im-portant. We fall behind for timeliness and holding attention, too. But here there is opportunity to pre-empt the competition, an asset that is equivocal, something we need yet to leverage.

Another battleground area relates to our demographics. You will recall from Sharon’s presentation that as socioeconomic status goes up, so does readership of the newspaper. One opportunity for us is to focus on the perceptual counterpart to that — a sense that it is important to use a medium that people you respect use — and to position news-papers clearly as that medium, to press the upward-mobility button in the minds of consumers. Two-thirds told us that "being used by peo-ple you respect" is quite important. When we compare us to other media, we do well, but we could do better given our demographics. That’s another battleground area that we need to leverage far more than we have in the past.

The next area focuses on five content areas we investigated that are very important to people. For three of them, we tend to underperform other media, but neither TV nor radio really dominated. They are cov-erage of the environment, science and technology, and health and fit-ness. These three collectively represent another area of opportunity for us, where things are very important to consumers and we really do have a shot at overwhelming the other media.

The final point I’d like to make as a battleground is among the most important, I think, and it has to do with being the most authoritative source available. We asked people questions that pertain to authority, fairness, accuracy, and just plain credibility. As you would easily imagine, nearly everyone wants their news source to be authoritative, to be fair, accurate, and believable. Sadly, when we asked people to rate our papers on those three fundamental aspects of authoritative-ness, we don’t do as well as consumers would like. In fact, the gaps are bigger than any of the other gaps that I’ve mentioned this morn-ing. That’s the bad news. The good news is no medium owns this di-mension of being the most authoritative source. When we compare us to them, there is clear opportunity for us to pre-empt these other me-dia, something that we need to act on.

That represents what I hope is a clear and simple picture of the bal-ance sheet that was uncovered in the survey. I hope I’ve given you a sense of both the strengths and the weaknesses and along with the weaknesses, the areas of opportunity. What I would like to do now is turn things back to Jennie Buckner who will talk a bit about the impli-cations of these findings for you and for the newsroom. Thank you.

Buckner: What do these findings say to you as an editor? Well, to me they say that there is still some good news, they say that newspapers are still an essentially strong medium, but they also show us that our hold on readers is weaker than we’d like, and one of those aspects, just to underscore it, was "Americans are less satisfied with newspa-pers than any other medium" when asked that overall satisfaction question.

Your colleagues on the Readership Committee, who have had a bit of a preview of this, hope that these findings are a call to action. As much as we in this room may think that we’ve changed our newspa-pers, I don’t think we have changed sufficiently. Because as improved as we may find our journalism, it isn’t good enough in our readers’ eyes. As much as we might malign it, more people would miss TV news than their local weekday newspaper. That frightens me, and I’m sure it concerns all of you. It’s time, it’s really past time for us to focus more on shoring up our weaknesses and figuring out how to leverage and play to our strengths.

This survey gives us some important clues on where to focus those efforts. Of course, it’s not a local survey and no national overview can give you the precise picture of your market, but here are implications that really ring true to me.

Number one, I think we need to be more intensely local than ever. We need to cover community news better. We’ve all known that local is the name of the game for a long time now, but look at the score. We’re not as far ahead as we ought to be on lots of local news meas-ures. This survey shows that we can expand and elevate our profile, especially in community coverage. When we looked at readers’ needs and how well they’re being met on government news, for instance, they’re largely being met, yet not for local community news. This says to me we may need to continue broadening our definitions of news and deepen our report.

For many of us, that may mean more aggressive, more tightly drawn community news sections. We may need to do more zoning, but per-haps not. Perhaps we simply need more reporters spending more time out in the neighborhoods looking for stories of grass-roots strug-gles and hometown heroes. Stories with a real-folks kind of feel that says, "This newspaper cares about life as I live it." Certainly, there may be resource implications in this community news strategy. More stringers might help us, so might reader-written material, but, ulti-mately, I think, our staffs and we must get more excited about telling those so-called smaller stories that come up from the neighborhoods. Unfortunately, community news is still seen as inconsequential and peripheral by too many journalists. We dismiss it at our peril.

Next, we need to be more relentlessly useful. Four of the top newspa-per strengths from this survey are advertising-driven. Store news, as we used to call it, matters to our readers, and we know it does be-cause it helps them save time and save money. It’s actionable. The research tells me we should consider increasing the volume, the quality and the visibility of our consumer reporting. We might consider building on classified advertising strengths, for instance, with a report on getting ahead with local employment trends, local job-training op-portunities, advice from local career changers. We live in a time of great work force unease. We talked yesterday about angst, but that angst is not just in newsrooms. There’s an opportunity for coverage that would pair with our classified job advertising. Newspapers need to empower readers. I’m not suggesting that we reduce the hard news. In fact, I’m saying that the soft news — so-called soft news — needs to get harder, more fact-filled. I think we need to work on get-ting beyond the empty, often commonsense utterings that masquer-ade as news to use in too many feature sections. Readers want hard news, but it seems to me that they want it connected back to them, connected with more breakout boxes of where to write for information, connected with Q&A columns that address their questions for the newsmakers of the day.

Being useful means all kinds of things. Detailed crime maps, more complete entertainment listings, annual comparison guides to your lo-cal schools complete with last year’s test scores and the student-teacher ratios. Being useful means making sure your election cover-age tells citizens where the candidates stand on issues that matter most to the people. We really can help readers in all kinds of ways, which brings me to the next implication.

Let’s offer more reporting on solutions. We need to investigate prob-lems. It’s part of every newspaper’s reason for being, and readers value it. But we also need to investigate solutions. People know their world is awash in problems. What readers don’t know is how do we tackle those issues as a community. Let’s be sure we’re reporting on the neighborhoods that have experienced the greatest drop in crime. What lessons do those places have for others? What schools have raised their test scores the most across your state? How? What could they teach your community? What innovative problems are lowering teen pregnancy rates? You get the idea. It’s an admittedly different definition of news for many of our people, but done well, these kinds of stories can have an almost man-bites-dog appeal. Readers are telling us they want a fuller picture of their world and they are expect-ing us to help the community. Isn’t that what brought many of us into this business?

Have some newspapers gone too far in the quick news approach? Are some of us not really understanding how to provide the meaning that readers are after? We should be the overwhelming choice when it comes to relevance and depth and meaning, but as you saw from John’s numbers, we’re not. Yes, many stories can and should be told shorter, but some need to offer more substance, more depth on topics that matter to readers. We need to be better in our explanatory work. We need better cut-to-the-heart-of-it nut graphs that really explain why I should give a damn about what I’m reading. Newspapers should be an intelligent agent operating on the reader’s behalf. We should have the authority and the expertise. That may mean we need to in-vest more in training our staffs about the subject matter that they’re covering. We live in a time of great complexity and change, and we need that crisp writer and that smart, insightful understanding about what’s really going on, and if we can’t beat television on providing meaning and understanding, then woe is us.

I want to emphasize that I don’t think newspapers should try to out-television television. Television, of course, is very good at tapping into emotions, and I don’t think we want to do just what they do, but we need to think more about that emotional bond that readers really can have and should have with the newspaper. How do you deepen an emotional connection? You start by not boring readers. We’re the least enjoyable medium when it came to this survey, and I think we can turn that back by providing more wonderful writing. We are a written medium; we need to be providing wonderful writing. We can have more powerful frozen moment photography that lasts in people’s minds. Let’s deepen the connection by offering more columnists who can really touch people. Let’s develop our narrative storytelling skills.

Next, we need to understand our advantages and do a much better job of selling those advantages. We need to remind our readers of what we’re doing for them, and plainly we need to promote our use-fulness and our local news strengths. The Sunday paper, of course, is that powerhouse that John has mentioned, and it has that incredible reach that should be a billboard for what we have upcoming during the week.

Ultimately, of course, we’ll keep our readers and gain readers through our credibility, I believe, and that respect has to be earned one day at a time through accuracy and fairness. Newspapers had a slight lead over television on some of the credibility measures but not enough to make any of us comfortable. And we are falling far short of reader ex-pectations.

As someone who has seen her newspaper written about a good bit during the past year, I am deeply sensitized to this issue. I was dis-tressed at the level of inaccuracy I found in stories about our newspa-per. All of us need to re-emphasize the basics. And we need to understand that accuracy is more than just getting the facts right. It’s about getting the right facts, with adequate background and proper context.

ASNE’s Journalism Values Institute is helping newsrooms understand that part of the public’s unease with us has to do with our inattention to capturing the right tone and the experiences of our public in an authentic way. We’re not ringing true to them. It has to do with looking beyond conflict to illuminate the underlying shades of an issue. It has to do with not just visiting the margins of society, but with dwelling there, as the JVI handbook points out.

Discussion of newspapers’ core values is part of making sure we’re more credible. Our staffs must own this problem. I’m afraid too many of them remain in a defensive crouch. Clearly, we have work to do, and I don’t think our newspapers will ever change enough, unless we rally more folks on our staffs to engage in the effort. We must also join to work more creatively with our business-side colleagues in this fight for readers. We need promotion. We need ideas. We need to under-stand this research, and then we need to call everyone into the fight. We need, frankly, much more imagination and much more will. We can compete, if we’ll just work harder to shore up those weaknesses and really build on the strengths, but we must first think competitively. It’s time. It’s really past time.

The Readership Committee will be trying to give you a workbook to deal with some of these ideas through the year. Thank you very much.