NIE Goal for 2005: Education or Inflation?

By: Jennifer Saba With great enthusiasm, Linda Rowe teaches English Literature to 11th and 12th graders at Mechanicsburg Senior High School in Mechanicsburg, Pa. Her 30-plus years of experience allow her to talk in-depth about what makes kids tick, what grabs their attention, and what they need to grow into productive adults.

She's also a champion of newspapers.

Early in her career, Rowe had an epiphany: Newspapers are terrific classroom tools. Getting them into her charges' hands was only the half of it, though. One day when Rowe passed out the paper to her 10th graders, one of her students slumped down in his desk, put down his head, and willfully ignored the newsprint. He wasn't copping an attitude ? he simply didn't know what to do with it.

"It went through me," Rowe recalls. "If they're not familiar with it or they don't know how to work it, the newspaper can be daunting. That moment I decided to help them read and become informed citizens." Rowe, who is known around the school as the "newspaper lady," now keeps copies of the local Patriot-News under lock and key for fear that other students and instructors will walk off with them.

One semester she taught entirely with newspapers until the school board got wind of it and decided her class should be based more on literature. With the Patriot-News, she teaches students how to use quotes and how to sequence sentences through comics. Her assignments require pupils to make their own paper to reflect whatever period they might be studying. If it's Jane Austen, they have to craft a newspaper straight out of Victorian England.

Rowe is certainly not alone in her belief that newspapers serve a purpose in the classroom. The Newspaper Association of America Foundation reports more than 106,000 schools throughout the country use newspapers, which touch over 11 million students mainly through the industry's Newspapers in Education (NIE) program. Since its inception in 1956, NIE's primary goal is to introduce kids to newspapers ? not only to make them better citizens, but also to turn them into future readers.

The premise seems simple enough. Circulation is on the decline, and as more and more adults bypass the town's daily, their children stand little chance of growing up in a newspaper-reading household. If the local paper arrives in the classroom, at the very least kids will be introduced to the medium and at some point, the thinking goes, become lifelong subscribers.

Mike Peterson, educational services director at The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y., frames it this way: "It's like a good cafeteria serving a balanced diet. That's one more meal in a day for some kids. For others, that is their one meal of the day. NIE is like that. For some, it's really the only time the adult world reaches out to them."

Many of those involved with NIE programs within their respective newspapers are just as passionate and just as dedicated to making sure that dailies are part of student life as the teachers who use them. These managers consistently reach out to faculty, getting them the right material and showing them that newspapers can help youngsters in such areas as standardized testing.

As idealistic as that thinking is, what started out as a way to get kids familiar with papers has morphed into another and, some charge, less effective animal. As recently as five years ago, NIE was focused squarely on education. Now, in the days of the incredible shrinking budget, those running the programs have to go out hat in hand to drum up sponsorships that allow the circ to be counted in the "other paid" category.

Many NIE managers have complained that the time-consuming responsibility of hunting for dollars leaves little room to build relationships with schools and teachers.

"I think some of the challenge does come when newspapers start to push NIE programs as a way to produce numbers," says Margaret Kaplow, educational services manager at The Washington Post. "It's not that we don't pay attention to numbers, we certainly do ... but when you just start looking for numbers, things start to slip."

Kaplow, who has been involved in some form of NIE for 14 years at the Post, says she doesn't feel any pressure herself, but in the past couple of months she's learned many other NIE people are leaving their positions. "Some have left because papers are making the push so much toward circulation. And some have left because the papers don't want to invest in the program," she says.

It's not a negative if newspapers use NIE within reason as a means to help grow circ numbers. The problem occurs when circ is the paper's first NIE priority. In the most extreme cases, the program is used as a shell to inflate the numbers. That happened at both the Chicago Sun-Times and Hoy in the recent circ schemes that created scandal and drew censure.

Beyond the circ, some wonder if newspapers are spinning their wheels. Why concentrate on the print product when kids are more apt to visit an online news site?

NIE managers tend to fall into one of two camps. There are those who are staunch supporters of the paper product, who maintain there are fewer distractions in print than online (no e-mail, chatting, etc.). "I believe in my medium," says Vin Montuori, vice president of marketing and head of the NIE program at the New York Post. "I'm interested in introducing new readers to a new paper rather than exploring the whiz-bang of a Web site."

There are other managers who think it's shortsighted to concentrate on the paper. It works for the younger grades, but older teens become bored more quickly. "We lose some of our audience when we get to the high school grades," says Deborah Doulette, NIE manger at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, in Northampton, Mass. "We can definitely use [the Web site] and offer it to teachers in the high school grades and help them be more creative. There's more ground to be gained with online use."

For example, the Washington Post utilizes its "Kids Post" section on its Web site along with the paper.

While some might think the continuing lag in newspaper readership among young readers suggests the program doesn't have lasting value, proponents argue otherwise. According to the NAA Foundation, 64% of those aged 18 to 34 who had a class where newspapers were part of the curriculum regularly read the newspaper today.

More and more newspapers are getting involved with NIE, too. Every paper with a circulation of more than 50,000 claims a program, according to Jim Abbott, vice president of the NAA Foundation.

Still, to underscore the challenges involved, just look at The Sun in Baltimore. Its daily circ is roughly 270,000, down 2.4% in the latest FAS-FAX. But it dropped its NIE program in the fall. When asked why, Gary Olszewski, circulation director for the Sun who oversees NIE, says it's been "temporarily suspended" and that it's in "transition." He declined to elaborate.

The program can work, according to those in the trenches. But it involves more than putting the papers in the classroom. For it to really take hold, the industry has to invest in teachers, convince them that the medium is a complimentary source to textbooks, and show them how it's done. "The first thing I encourage is training the teachers," says Abbott. "To me, that's the heart of the program."

All about relationships

For the past 15 years, Robie Scott has served as educational services manager at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., a job she believes is not unlike a politician's. "Wherever there are teachers assembled en masse, I'm there," she says. "I'm shaking hands reminding them who I am. I'm like a candidate running for office."

Her mission is not to just get teachers to take the paper, but to ensure they are using it properly. In fact, Scott won't let educators sign up for NIE unless they go through her free workshops (80% of teachers sign up with NIE after this). "Training is the cornerstone," she says. "I introduce the teachers to the newspaper and [show them] that it's a supplement to the textbook. And then I talk about the newspapers, not how to teach."

About 35% to 40% of Scott's time is spent in the schools, helping teachers understand insider-type jargon familiar to journalists and publishers, terms like datelines and jumps. Or she provides them with specific material to meet a standard. She even plays the role of customer service representative, making sure the papers get delivered on time and, when it's raining, they aren't soaking wet. "I think the great challenge with NIE departments is, are you getting out there and building a relationship? Teachers know they can call me, and they do."

The NIE department at the Post and Courier conducts an annual survey of teachers as a benchmark. The 20-page document reported mostly positive comments. "It was a tragedy the few weeks we did not get them," one teacher wrote. Another said, "As an 8th grade history teacher, my students looked forward to reading their papers every Thursday."

There was the occasional deflating statement: "Students will do anything to avoid reading," one teacher observed. "And I teach gifted and talented students."

For the most part, Scott thinks it's been a success ? so much so, she can't take on more schools. "We're running full throttle," she explains. "We're at the point where the circulation director is coming to me and saying, 'hold up.'"

The Post and Courier, which has a daily circ of 95,588, gets roughly 4% to 6% of its numbers from its NIE program. "I could shoot over that easy," says Scott, adding that if she did, advertisers would be none too pleased. "You have to ask yourself, if you are a major retailer, do you really want to market to 4th graders?" But she's quick to point out that 85% of the teachers who take the paper sign up to take it the following year: "Imagine if every department in the paper had that retention rate."

Who's getting the tab?

Indeed, one of the paradoxes of NIE is that once teachers are hooked and success of the program spreads, newspapers may find themselves in the position of not being able to accommodate schools.

The New York Post, one of the biggest dailies in the country, delivers approximately 30,000 papers to 389 schools every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the five boroughs of New York, for free. NIE is a big initiative at the tabloid. "I have a waiting list for at least another 500 schools," says Montuori. "Unfortunately, I have to find sponsors for the papers."

It's not an easy job and Montuori comes from the largest market, rich and ripe with potential. His sponsorships run the gamut from $5,000 to $250,000 but he still has to convince businesses with already limited ad budgets that NIE is a viable program ? that future readers make future consumers.

His counterparts in small towns cite the same frustrations. The Daily Hampshire Gazette's Doulette remembers that five or six years ago about a quarter of her teachers would pay. Now with school budget constraints, her paper has to find ways to provide it for free. "For us, it's a challenge in that it takes a number of hours of work in addition to the other work," Doulette says, adding that she's lucky: "I have an assistant who is a wonderful fund-raiser."

Some in the industry, like the Post-Star's Peterson, think it's a good idea to have teachers shell out some money. He says that for him, fund raising hasn't been a huge issue. "It's pretty much a slam-dunk because we're so well known [in the community]. Our teachers pay half."

But he reasons getting teachers to pony up for part of the subscription is an added incentive because those teachers are even more apt to use the papers in the class. And if it's offered totally for free (via a sponsor) there's room to abuse the program. That's when it can become more about circulation than education.

Growing circ, carefully

As it stands with ABC, NIE papers count towards overall circ but it's tallied in the "other paid" column along with hotel, third-party sponsors, and employee copies. If a newspaper wants, it can dump extra sponsored papers in schools, inflating circulation but annoying teachers.

The NAA Foundation's Abbott estimates that NIE should account for roughly 3% to 5% of overall circulation. "There are challenges at some papers where the focus is on today's circulation," Abbott says. "On the other end there are those papers that focus on education and don't care about today's numbers. The majority of programs fall someplace in between those extremes."

Paul Crowner, newspapers in education manager at The Chronicle in Centralia, Wash., feels fortunate. His publisher fully supports NIE while putting little pressure on him to grow the numbers. But he says he encounters colleagues at other papers where it's only about the bottom line.

The Post and Courier's Scott is blunt when discussing circulation and NIE: "I've had the privilege of speaking at a lot of conferences for circulation directors. I tell them that I can come into their market and I don't care where they are, I can find money to start a NIE program and I can put newspapers in schools and I can bump your circ up. But, and this is a big but, if I don't train the teachers and establish a relationship, that circulation will drop off.

"If all you want to do is [quickly] bump your circ up, there are other ways to do it rather than NIE. You wind up shooting yourself in the foot. Not only that, you get the schools angry with you. They don't want them there."

When teachers and schools think newspapers are only there to shill copies, everybody loses. Even legitimate NIE programs can feel the sting. Doulette says that one of her obstacles is just explaining what NIE means: "Some of the teachers hear 'NIE,' but we should slow down and spell it out. We are not the sales wing of circulation. We are a complete department on our own, and we exist to help them. Some teachers start to think of NIE as more of a sales thing and I hate that."

Doulette says that while she doesn't encounter that attitude often, she does hear it from colleagues at much larger papers: "They have a harder road to walk. It's fun to meet with them, but then I come home and say, 'I'm staying here!'"

Communication a must

One way to avoid NIE becoming a circ beast is to house NIE managers in the editorial department. At the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance, Cassondra Phares serves as educational services director. "My background is journalism," Phares notes. She held editorial jobs at the paper before NIE. "I'm based in the newsroom, and many [NIE managers] are based in circulation," she says. "It's always been that way so we can emphasize quality content for these kids."

It's not that Phares is isolated, either. Or that the Advance has no interest in growing circulation. She keeps in touch with the business side and she acknowledges that NIE represents about 4% of the paper's circ (61,443 daily, 78,517 Sundays).

"The circulation manager," she explains, "has never said to me, 'how are you going to get your numbers up?' We're on the same page, working together. I feel lucky to be in the atmosphere that I'm in."