The Impact Study

By Frank Denton

The following is one of eight solutions to increase readership identified in the industry-financed Impact study of 100 newspapers. It is from “The Power to Grow Readership,” an April 2001 report of the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.

Solution 3: Americans expect their local newspaper to be a collection of all sorts of news and information. Nothing in the Impact study indicates the need to expand one sort of news to the exclusion of another.

What the research shows, though, is a strong reader appetite for news that is intensely local and personally relevant. In recent years newspapers have focused more and more on “local news.” What the Impact research shows is that there is still a large, unrealized potential for local news of a particular kind.

“Intensely local, people-centered news” ranks at the top of the list of content items with the greatest potential to increase overall readership of the newspaper. It includes community announcements (including weddings, events, etc.), stories about ordinary people, and obituaries.

This finding confirms earlier research that has identified local news as newspapers’ unique strength but takes that notion further. It includes “chicken dinner” news — community events — but is not limited to events. It includes stories about ordinary people. It could be reasonably concluded that this extends to coverage of other news topics through their effects on ordinary people. It also includes obituaries, which at their best can be engaging stories about people’s lives.

The finding also quantifies the opportunity — which is large — for newspapers that can satisfy readers’ appetite for an intensely local, personally relevant and people-centered approach.

Content analysis found readers’ desire for more “localness” operating at another level as well. Newspapers that have more content written in a feature-style approach are perceived as being more local than those in which a straight-news approach dominates.

In this way, the fact that a newspaper covers more “local” news — news of politics, government, business, sports and other topics with a local focus —does not necessarily result in a newspaper with a local feel. The approach to story writing creates the sense of localness. Another finding — that newspapers with a higher level of staff-written stories did not have higher satisfaction levels — confirms that it is less a matter of who writes the story than how it is written.