Readership: Forget what you know

By Rick Rodriguez

Newspapers have “a huge window of opportunity” to increase readership, according to the director of the largest study ever done on the subject.

John Lavine, director of the Readership Institute, a division of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, told the ASNE convention session in April that the 18-month-long study of 37,000 readers and 100 newspapers across the country has not only debunked myths about decreasing newspaper readership but provided eight solutions to increasing it.

The exhaustive study, in which newspaper readers each were asked 450 questions, has shown, for example, “It’s absolutely not true that pressure on time is keeping people from reading newspapers,” Lavine said.

Nor is it true that other media are “eating our lunch.” In fact, other media are continuing to fragment while newspapers have consolidated and solidified their positions in their markets.

“Daily newspapers have not been this strong since the 40s, since just before the sort of explosion of television onto the scene,” said Lavine.

However, Lavine cautioned that the industry’s 30-year record of declining daily and Sunday readership and an even worse record among 21-25 year-olds are “real threats out there.”

“But we have a moment in time, for the next three to five years, where we’ve leveled off, (other media) are fragmenting and that’s a huge window of opportunity,” he said.

“The facts are that our research shows, big time, that growth is possible, that there are not one or two things you can do — but eight,” he said. The solutions apply equally to small newspapers as well as large newspapers, he said.

The eight solutions to grow readership, according to The Readership Institute, are:

• Over-the-top customer service
• Relevant content
• A particular kind of local news
• An easier-to-read, navigable paper
• Advertising that draws readership
• Brand perception
• In-paper promotion
• A constructive employee culture

Lavine said the conclusions were based on analysis of how each of the 37,000 readers used newspapers — how much time they spent reading, how often they read them and how thoroughly they read them.

The Institute used those three elements — time, frequency and completeness — to create a new measurement, a Reader Behavior Score, “so that we can truly see what reading and readership is going on, and can measure, now, what it is, and if we do this again down the road, what the change has been,” Lavine said.

Readers with a higher RBS tended to spend more time with the paper and are less likely to churn out, the study showed.

The list of solutions, Lavine said, is not revolutionary. “Every one of them, I suspect, you’re going to recognize. We’ve talked about them for years. Familiar list. It’s terribly important that if you take this home… you start saying to yourself, who’s going to be held really accountable for moving the needle on these?”

Over the top

Like many of the items on the list, over-the-top customer service is going to require cooperation and coordination with multiple departments. And it’s going to require a Nordstrom or FedEx level of service.

“One of the reasons you have to make big leaps is that’s the only territory that’s going to get you major results,” Lavine said. “So they have to be sort of “over-the-top” kinds of things.”

For example, in Myrtle Beach, he said, a reader “can pick up the phone, I’m told, call the newspaper and say, ‘Would you deliver my paper tomorrow morning to the barber shop?’ and they will. We’re talking ad hoc, respond, boom,” Lavine said.

Service factors that drove Reader Behavior Scores were the condition and completeness of the paper; quality of paper, ink and type size; when and how the paper is delivered; accuracy of the bill; cost of home delivery; and response to customer issues.

What readers want

The study recommended that news resources should be focused on content that readers care about. Among 30 groupings of news topics that were evaluated by the 37,000 readers, the study concluded that nine have the potential to increase the time, frequency and completeness with which the paper was read. They are, in order:

News about community and ordinary people. Readers want more stories and they want to see different points of view of the paper.

Health, home, food, fashion and travel. They want more, they want “feature-style” stories, they want personal stories and they want more “go-and-do stories.”

Politics, government and international issues, particularly those about war. They want coverage in both the opinion and news sections, photographs and in in-depth, feature-style stories.

n Natural disasters and accidents. They want careful editing of stories and photographs. And while they clearly feel disaster coverage is important, they don’t want disasters over-covered.

Movies, television and weather. Readers want information to help them decide what to watch or what to do.

Business and finance. Readers want the gamut from news to commentary to criticism to advice. They want help in understanding and navigating the business world and their financial affairs.

Science, technology and the environment. Recognizing the complexity of these issues, they want a broader, international focus with longer stories that explain complicated issues.

Police and crime. They want a more local focus.

Sports. They want less focus on straight-game reporting and more on features, commentary, criticism and advice.

Another content issue on the list of eight solutions is one that emphasizes a particular kind of local news. The research showed that readers want stories about the lives of ordinary people and about how stories relate to and affect them.

“I can’t emphasize this one too much,” Lavine said. “People want to know about all the stories you do through the lives of ordinary people.

“You can get a two-fer here,” he said.

“You can make national and international stories or other kinds of stories on the list feel like local, if you show how they play out in the lives of somebody in your community.”

Seriously, make it fun

On the issue of making the paper easier to navigate, Lavine said, it isn’t only a matter of design. “Make it fun. People want to relax — and that’s the word they use — …when they get the newspaper. You know, it can be serious, but don’t make it stuffy and staid.”

Lavine said new readers could be brought in with targeted advertising campaigns. For example, do newspapers have ads that appeal to 20-to-35-year-old women? And if they do get them as readers, is there editorial content that appeals to them?

“The wall between news and advertising is not even touched in what I’m describing to you. It’s simply ads can bring people to read the news,” he said.

Brand perception, the study shows, is a key to driving readership. It represents relevance to the reader.

In-paper promotion, Lavine said, also “has a major impact and you’ve got to have a plan if you’re going to use this because it can do just an enormous amount to get results for you.”

Finally, Lavine said, “We’re going to have to tear down a defensive culture.” Studies have found newspaper cultures are most like the military and hospitals, he said. Newspapers need to change to a more constructive culture that cuts across division lines and works for the good of the newspaper, he said.

“Now I understand you can’t do all eight of them equally well, but let me tell you you have to make a really major try at all of them. One or two picked, selected, doesn’t do it. You’ve got to do all of them,” Lavine said.

Lavine urged editors to begin working on the solutions immediately. “You can’t wait for your retirement and you can’t wait for the Internet to come,” he said. “You’ve got a window closing.”

In comments following Lavine’s presentation, ASNE President Tim McGuire said the study’s results “are challenging, provocative and helpful.

“I can tell some of you are fidgeting and fuming and wondering if this study meets your intellectual standards,” he said. “Some of you may want to fight about the findings. Some of you may be as excited as hell. I’m excited as hell.”

McGuire said that the three things that excite him about the study are that the path to increasing readership goes through content; that it requires a total newspaper commitment and that the Reader Behavior Score constitutes a major breakthough in the long circulation/readership debate.

Rodriguez is the executive editor of The Sacramento Bee.