A newspaper a day

By: Mark Fitzgerald A newspaper a day
Penn State students learn to love their daily papers

The catch line in the movie "Field of Dreams" was, "If you build it, they will come." One university has found that if you give young people newspapers, they will read.
This simple, yet ingenious, plan was the brainchild of Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier.
Spanier's idea was simple: College kids should be able to pick up local and national newspapers free every morning from racks in their dormitories. The cost of the program would be covered by a slight increase in student fees.
After beginning as a small experiment in the 1997-98 school year, the Penn State Residence Hall Newspaper Readership program has just completed its first full year - and the results are turning on its head the conventional wisdom that young people simply won't read newspapers.
Before the pilot program began, the university survey found that just 15% of students said they had the daily or regular habit of reading USA TODAY, The New York Times, or the local paper, the Centre Daily Times in State College.
Penn State took the poll again this spring and found that 73% of students now read a paper every day or almost every day.
Students also say they like what newspapers do for them: In substantial numbers, students told researchers that they are getting more out of their college education because they are reading papers; that newspaper reading prepares them better for classroom discussions; and that they understand and can discuss current events better than ever.
For the newspapers distributed at Penn State's main campus in University Park and eight other satellite campuses across the Keystone State, these research numbers translate into significant circulation gains. In the academic year that just ended, the university says 13,000 Penn State students picked up about 30,700 copies of the general-circulation papers every week.
For the 25,000-circulation Centre Daily Times, just being on the racks in the 44 dorms on the main campus has meant an average increase in daily circulation of 2.5%, says Henry Haitz III, vice president and chief financial officer.
"This is something people around the industry - advertising people as well as circulation people - need to take a look at," Haitz says. "Penn State did a study that shows the effect of students on the local economy is in the $180-million-plus range. That's $4,000 per student, who are spending money and developing brand loyalties."
So far, the program is not a money maker. "We don't make any money," says Haitz. "We lose or break even a little."
At least one academic who has studied the Penn State program, Central Michigan University journalism professor John K. Hartman, thinks it provides the newspaper industry with the best opportunity to turn around its problems with young readership.
"This represents to me the biggest breakthrough in making newspapers attractive to young adults since the founding of USA TODAY in 1982," Hartman says.
In an interview and an upcoming article in Newspaper Research Journal, Hartman notes that newspaper readership has fallen off most acutely among young adults. Three decades ago, 60% of adults 18 to 29 years old reported reading a daily paper every day; now, fewer than 25% do.
"As a college professor, I have to do anything from begging to threatening to get a student to read a daily paper - and I'm a journalism professor," Hartman says. "Yet when these three daily papers are made as easy to access as cable TV or radio or even the computer - and you know, in the time it takes to boot up, you could run out to the hall and get a paper - what Penn State found is that the number of young people reading a paper skyrockets."
Residence halls in the main University Park campus are equipped with open racks carrying USA TODAY, The New York Times, the Centre Daily Times and The Daily Collegian, the student paper that receives a $200,000 subsidy from the university. Students can take a copy of any paper, all of them - or none.
At satellite campuses, another local paper is substituted. The papers offered are the Altoona Mirror; the Erie Morning News; the Hazleton Standard-Speaker; The Patriot-News in Harrisburg; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; The Record Herald in Waynesboro; and the York Daily Record or The York Dispatch, which have a joint operating agreement.
Penn State pays for the program by assessing an extra $5 fee each semester on a resident student's bill for room and board.
Beyond the dramatic spike in readership, the Penn State program challenges other firmly held assumptions about young adults' media use.
Researchers are finding that making newspapers easily accessible not only drives readership numbers way up - it appears to change how young adults get news. Penn State's surveys find that the Internet is not the medium of choice for news.
"I think the most interesting thing to come out is that newspapers remain the most preferred media," says Betty Moore of the Student Affairs Research and Assessment Office. Moore found that fully 68% of surveyed students say they never access newspapers through Web sites, and just 4% do it "very often."
And when it comes to these students at least, forget the mantra about newspapers needing to be "local, local, local." At Penn State, the newspaper of choice is not a student paper or a local one - but the national daily USA TODAY. The survey conducted this spring did not measure relative popularity of the papers, but a November 1997 study quoted by Hartman found that in the survey week, USA TODAY was the most widely picked up, with 14,200 copies; followed by The Daily Collegian, with 11,000 copies in the dormitories; Centre Daily Times, with 7,500; and The New York Times, with 6,800.
"On the main campus, USA TODAY pretty consistently is the most popular," says university spokesman Bill Mahon. "It goes up and down, but USA TODAY tends to do very good on Fridays. And we can make some educated guesses that certain news events tend to draw attention, such as USA TODAY's Princess Di coverage."
The local paper for the main campus, Centre Daily Times, is not taking its own circulation windfall for granted, says the Times' Haitz.
"We're not looking to make this good just for the Centre Daily Times; we want to make it worthwhile for the students, too," he says.
Because the university is such a huge employer in Centre County, the Daily Times has always covered it intensively. With its additional student readers, it has bulked up its "Weekender" Friday entertainment section - and it even replates its Sunday TV book to reflect the slightly different channels offered in Penn State dorms.
University president Spanier's gift to papers circulating in Pennsylvania may soon be matched with new rules from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) that will allow newspapers to count the papers distributed in dormitories as paid circulation.
Right now the paper accounts for the circulation in its Newspaper In Education (NIE) category under a one-year allowance by ABC. Haitz says the paper is sold to the university "at at least 50% of basic price ? to qualify for ABC." He declined to specify the price.
An ABC task force is formulating rules that would create a "university residential" category for programs like the one at Penn State. To date, the hang-up for auditors has been how to measure a student's opportunity to decline a newspaper by not spending money on it - a key element in ABC's definition of paid circulation.
"Based on the program that's set up here, there is some interpretation of what does 'decline' mean," says the Centre Daily Times' Haitz. "Does a student decline on the room and board, is he or she reimbursed, or does it mean that a student just doesn't pick up a copy?"
An ABC spokeswoman says the task force will likely make its recommendation at the board meeting scheduled for July.
"I don't think students tend to stay here in State College," Haitz says, "but I think they will take their newspaper readership habit with them wherever they go."
A Pennsylvania State University program has students reading newspapers regularly.
?(Editor & Publisher Web Site:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
?(copyright: Editor & Publisher May 29, 1999) [Caption]