LANDMARK PROJECT PROMISES TO REVERSE READERSHIP SLIDE

By: Mark Fitzgerald A Special Report On Readership Institute's Impact Study





Inside a small suite in a snazzy glass-and-steel office building that dwarfs its neighbors along a nondescript street on the edge of downtown Evanston, Ill., a dozen or so people are crunching numbers on a project that may very well be the best hope - or last chance - newspapers will ever have of reversing a readership decline they have been unable to stanch for 50 years.



"They are working on 12 different research instruments that are going to reveal things about newspaper readership we have never

seen before," says Tim J. McGuire, editor and senior vice president of new media for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. "Nobody has ever done this kind of thing in the complete way they are doing it, with all the connections between consumers, content analysis, marketing, circulation, management, culture. They will be mixing and matching in a way that's never been possible before - and the data [are] going to be the richest we've ever seen."



McGuire is one of a growing number of newspaper executives who are fired up about the work going on in that Evanston office of the Readership Institute, a program of Northwestern University's Media Management Center. In an industry famous for churning out studies that take early retirement on the shelf, editors and publishers talk about the Readership Institute's "Impact" study of readership with something approaching awe. Full results of the study will not burst out until April, but executive enthusiasm has been stoked by the early results - concerning newspapers' "militaristic" management style - that the Readership Institute has released in recent weeks.



"It's the multidimensional aspect of it that [I like]," says Robin Seymour, research director for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one of the newspapers taking part in the study. It's too much to expect papers to do this internally - "to step back and really take a look at market and readers and products in a quantified way," Seymour says.



The study tackles the most important question in readership: What brings people to the paper? It weighs the importance of articles and advertising content in attracting readers. And it explores questions such as this: Is a newspaper that offers a more diverse work force and great work environment more likely to draw readers than one that is ruthlessly efficient, getting the newspaper to the front porch dry and on time?



The depth and breadth of the study is staggering. It involves detailed surveys of the news, production, advertising, circulation, and management practices of 100 dailies placed in a computer-generated random sample to reflect the mix of papers of all sizes in urban, suburban, and rural markets across the continental United States. (The newspapers range in circulation from the 573,000-circulation Chicago Tribune to The Evening News, a 10,147-circulation paper in Jeffersonville, Ind.)



Readership Institute researchers are conducting content analysis of 75,000 newspaper articles. In a nation that learns who's up and who's down in the presidential race from polls based on a sample of less than 1,000 people, this study has amassed a survey pool of 30,000 readers and nonreaders.



That is only the beginning, promises Readership Institute Director John Lavine. "Everything we deliver will be actionable," he declares. "As far as we're concerned, the only kind of research that matters is research that you can take action on. Knowledge is great, but unless it's actionable, it's not real valuable in our view."



Getting a read on the problem



Readership is the lifeblood of newspapers - but it's been bleeding away since the early 1950s when a TV in the living room began to be more ubiquitous than a newspaper at the doorstep. However it's measured, newspaper readership - especially daily newspaper readership - is on a long and continuous slide downhill.



In 1970, according to statistics compiled by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), 77.6% of adults over 18 years of age read a daily paper during the week. By last year, that figure was down to 56.9%. The decline in Sunday readership is slower, but apparently just as inexorable.



Circulation has followed the same doleful trend. In 1999, newspapers sold 55,979,332 copies on an average weekday, according to the Editor & Publisher International Year Book. That represents a decline of nearly 3 million copies since 1960 - a period when the United States added about 95 million people.



For a while, newspapers told themselves that baby boomers would be their salvation. When this huge cohort began having kids and buying houses, the thinking went, boomers would start reading the paper just as their parents and grandparents had.



That hasn't happened, and research uncovered by the Readership Institute shows why: Young adults aged 21 to 25 have been steadily dropping the daily newspaper reading habit. Where about 60% of young adults were daily readers in 1967, the percentage has declined every five years to barely 20% in 1997.



Individually and industrywide, newspapers redoubled their readership efforts in the last few years - with no noticeable effect. "There's not anything significantly positive going on in the whole circulation/readership areas," NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm says. "My sense is we still have some declines, although that's based on a seat-of-the-pants feeling. The sense that I get is that, as it is for all media, it's still a battle out there for market share."



Two years ago, NAA convened a "readership summit" to work on the problem. The result was an agreement between NAA and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to set the newly founded Readership Institute loose.



The doctor will see you now



In a long journalism career, Readership Institute Director John Lavine has been a weekly and daily newspaper publisher, a consultant, an academic, and the president of the major accrediting organization for j-schools. But he may have made his biggest mark in newspapering as founding director of the Media Management Center, which brought together two world-class Northwestern University schools: the Medill School of Journalism and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.



"That's been a constant refrain for nearly 40 years: 'We've got all this information, but what of all this actually drives readership?'" Lavine says. "'What out of all this matters?' Now we're going to have a baseline that lets us know."



The "Impact" study probes into three areas that may affect readership: who reads or doesn't read newspapers; what's in newspapers; and how newspapers organize themselves. Researchers are vacuuming information from newspapers in a manner that is unprecedented in its sweep and detail.



Consider the content analysis. Lavine says, "We not only know what kind of news article was printed, but what page it appeared on, what side of the page, was there a photo or graphic with it, how long was it."



To get those articles, the study required participating newspapers to send by Federal Express a copy of their paper on specific days over a two-month period. That was on top of the huge set of questionnaires that landed on newspaper desks throughout the study. Do you use role-playing when hiring an ad salesman? What weight newsprint do you use? Do you publish a single-copy sales edition that is different in appearance from the home-delivery edition?



"I'm not sure they knew what they were volunteering for," Mary Nesbitt, the Readership Institute's managing director, says of the 100 test papers. Indeed, Tom Lindley III, editor and publisher of the smallest paper in the study, Jeffersonville's Evening News, says the scope of the survey was a shock. "It really does require a little bit of work getting all the departments to go along," he reported, "and, for a small paper, the expense, say, of overnighting the papers, that adds up."



For The Evening News, one immediate gauge of the study was to show the paper's reader loyalty: Subscribers got a little suspicious when the detailed questionnaires arrived, Lindley says. Many asked him if it was OK to fill them out.



Lindley, too, found himself a little concerned by the survey: "It brings up some [problems] that I just hadn't thought about before, as if I needed more things to worry about. But a lot of people don't like to go to the doctor. We've been willing to do that - and I think it'll pay off in the health of the paper."



On bigger papers in the study, the survey work dovetailed with individual efforts into readership. The Advocate in Baton Rouge, La., for instance, is studying the readership habits of people involved in civic organizations such as the Kiwanis Club to see if they can yield useful readership hints.



At the Houston Chronicle, circulation and readership, which had soared after the rival Houston Post folded in 1995, have slumped in recent years, although circulation bounced back in the last reporting period. To turn the trend around, the paper created an interdepartmental Readability Committee, says Assistant Managing Editor Susan Bischoff, its chairperson.



The first specific result was the addition of a color weather map. "Now, a color weather map, that may not sound like much," she says, "but readers told us that was what they wanted," she says. With color positions limited by press capacity, the paper put it on the back of its sports section. "In the best of all possible worlds, we wouldn't put it there, but it showed the cooperation you can get: We got the advertising department to move an ad off a section back," Bischoff says.



Back at the Readership Institute, Lavine said that when the "Impact" study is released at the annual meetings of the NAA and ASNE, it should spawn many specific ideas. Lavine suggests one himself: "Name one paper that has a major program to drive pass-along [readership]? Why not? No retailer has ever said, 'You can't buy that blouse because you didn't pay for the paper in which you saw the ad.'"



Better read than dead



At the same time, Lavine says, the study will not be a grab bag of quick fixes. "There's this tendency of newspapers to say, 'Well, we'll fix it, and move on to the next thing.' But there's a reason that [readership trend] line is going down - and it is that there is not a magic bullet. Fixing readership is a process," he says.



"What I like about what John is doing is he recognizes that readership is a total newspaper kind of undertaking," says Star Tribune Editor McGuire. "You can't put a cute little feature in and say, 'There, that takes care of readership.'"



McGuire takes over as ASNE president just as the "Impact" study will be released. He says it will be a cornerstone of his efforts to get newspapers to change their priorities: "We have been stuck, in the last few years, for radical kind of solutions. The most important thing the 'Impact' study can do is focus and motivate us - and the industry could use that. The fact is, the last couple of years we've been awfully focused on the bottom line. Maybe this will pull us out of thinking just about cutting expenses and get us into thinking about growing readership."



In his office, Lavine calls up a chart that shows daily and Sunday readership along a line that swoons from 1970 to 2000 - and projects it beginning to fall off more steeply in the decade to come. "This is a gun pointed at the head of every newspaper in the industry," Lavine says. "But these lines are going to change. They are going to change."







Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.







Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.