May 16, 2010
Research compiled by Clyde Bentley
It must be spring. The statistics are blooming again for newspapers. The traditional media, it seems, is not as bad off as its critics believe.
Togetherness: While we've all read how total newspaper readership is declining, Scarborough Research found a new angle on the issue. The rate of readers per copy has increased significantly over the past three years. In Scarborough's 2007 survey, an average of 3.07 adults read a copy of a printed daily newspaper. That grew 7.5% to 3.30 adults in 2009. Actual readership of newspapers is declining more slowly than circulation, the report notes.
Scarborough emphasized the importance of readership numbers over circulation numbers to advertisers, but it is probably even more important to editors. The "pass-along" audience is always full of surprises to the editor who envisions the mom-pop-kids traditional family. Pew Research, for instance, found that the number of households with multi-generation adults is growing substantially. Part of the reason nearly 20% of families fall into that status is that Boomers are taking care of elderly parents. But 13% of parents with grown children said one or more of the kids has "boomeranged" back home after being out of the nest -- often after losing a job.
The challenge for editors is to determine how shifts in family makeup impact assumptions about "loyal readers." These multi-generational families include demographics that have avoided subscriptions due to price or inconvenience. But a "free" paper passed along retains its impact.
Traditional success: Sometimes the old ways are still the best, according to Robert Entman, a noted scholar of media framing theory. In Improving Newspapers’ Economic Prospects by Augmenting Their Contributions to Democracy, the George Washington University professor says newspapers still need to go after the masses even if they switch to membership, non-profit or alternative business plans. His analysis of scholarly writings and media business reports concludes that newspapers need to respond to the threats and opportunities of new technology, but should maintain their traditional status as the mass media source of political news for Americans. But to provide the broad-based appeal that will also attract advertisers and financial support, newspapers must enhance their political journalism with emotion and narrative, but also reporting that is "simple, not stupid."
Reading habit morphs to media addiction: A group of University of Maryland students who cut their ties to all media for 24 hours was so upset that researchers said college students are "functionally unable to be with media links to the world. The researchers asked 200 students to go without media for a day and later talk about it on a private classroom blog. The students suffered their strongest withdrawal pains over their inability to check social networking systems. They were not fans of traditional news media, but they had a fairly good grasp of current events that researchers said likely came from information passed along text messaging, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter routes.
Still, they sorely missed being informed -- a portent of opportunity for all sorts of news organizations. One student said he was torn by the realization he "had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."
They should try it for more than a day. In 2005, I switched off my e-mail for a week and blogged the impact of my fast. My coworkers were almost more disturbed than I was -- they actually had to call me or walk down the hall. I was constantly nervous as the un-answered messages piled into my inbox. At the end, someone suggested I get a helper to sort through all those messages and sift out the good ones. I the person who does that kind of job is called a "journalist."
Reaching the young: Does the newsroom banter about "who's our audience" make your head spin? You apparently are not alone. Writing in the Newspaper Research Journal, University of Texas researcher Kelly Kaufholdfound marked differences between reporters and editors when she surveyed them about reaching the younger audience. The newspaper and television journalists polled by Kaufhold overwhelmingly agreed that young adults prefer online news to other media and that it is important to present the news in a manner appealing to that younger audience. However, it was the editors (58%) rather than the reporters (41%) who said audience age is important in selecting stories.
Just over half (54%) of the journalists said breaking news was key and to reaching youth a similar number (53%) said young adults are more interested in entertainment than politics. Far more editors than reporters, however, said entertainment news is important (86%-68%).
But take heart - your peers on both side of the desk are still optimistic. Less than 1% of the journalists said young adults won't follow news "no matter what."
They are not us: Also in the latest Newspaper Research Journal, a team that includes three of my Missouri colleagues reported data the shows citizen journalism Web sites complement newspaper Web sites rather than compete with them for the general audience. Margaret Duffy, Esther Thorson and Ken Fleming of Missouri joined Stephen Lacy of Michigan State and Daniel Riffe at North Carolina in a huge analysis of 86 blogs, 53 citizen news sites and 63 daily newspaper sites. They compared all the publications on a large set of effectiveness measures often associated with non-traditional news sources. These included social interaction, ease of access, timeliness and citizen content.
By those criteria, newspaper Web sites deliver the superior product. Part of that, the researchers said, is due to the extra resources the newspapers can muster that the citizen sites cannot afford. But like weeklies, "citizen news and blog sites can serve as complements to daily newspapers. They can provide opinion and hyperlocal news that large dailies do not. Dailies have more resources, but they tend to concentrate those resources on issues that affect larger geographic areas in their market."
Contact Me:
E-mail - bentleycl@missouri.edu Twitter: http://twitter.com/MizzouBentley
