(Limor Peer)

If you stayed up late last Saturday night to watch TV (or seen it on your TiVo or on YouTube), you may have seen Saturday Night Live do a parody of CNN's Wolf Blitzer's program "The Situation Room". It was pretty funny stuff -- Blitzer trying to cover Iraq and other "big news," while the "on-screen news crawl" and even his reporters kept focusing on the Anna Nicole Smith story.

It was funny because it mimicked real life. Larry King did, after all, call it the #1 story around the world (see here). But it was funny also because it struck a chord with the public: the media is perceived as using their vast resources and influence to cover the sort of things that the public intuitively knows are not really that important in the grand scheme of things.

Compromising quality is a dangerous thing -- it can lead to compromised credibility. Phil Meyer has shown the connection between quality and credibility (and ultimately profitability) and argued that "cutbacks in content quality will erode public trust, weaken societal influence, and eventually lead to losses in circulation and advertising dollars."

Let's focus on credibility for a moment -- a word which is used interchangeably with trust and confidence.

We have all seen studies that show that public confidence in the press as an institution is low… Just last Sunday, a New York Times article using data from the General Social Survey (a biennial study of about 3,000 adults in the U.S.), confirmed that gloomy picture -- the number of people who say they have a great deal of confidence in the press has declined since the 1970s, and it is smaller than the number of people who have a great deal of confidence in Congress, religion, the military, and medicine.

(Interestingly, even as the news media are rated as not very accurate, as likely to favor one side over the other, and as likely to be influenced by powerful people or organizations, they continue to receive favorable ratings from the public, according to the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.)

But, "the media" are not "my local daily newspaper" (just like Congress is not my local Congressman). People seem to have a different response when asked directly about the newspaper they usually read. Writing in the Newspaper Research Journal in 2004, Phil Meyer identified several studies that show that, when asked specifically about their local newspaper, people rate newspapers very high on various questions related to credibility, believability, and trust.

In our own study of the 100 Impact papers last fall, we found that 75% of respondents say they trust their local daily newspaper to do a good job most of the time or just about always. Younger people, in particular, and those with lower education and income levels tend to have slightly higher levels of trust in the newspaper. What's more, we found that trust correlates with readership -- people who trust the newspaper are more likely to read it.

Trust, however, is not just an opinion or attitude one has about the newspaper (and that you can measure with a single question). Trust is a relationship; it is a product of an ongoing interaction a person has with the newspaper product, brand, and service; it is an experience.

In our newspaper experience research, we found that it encompasses several ideas:

1. I trust it to tell the truth
2. The newspaper offers a variety of different perspectives
3. It is very professional
4. It is unbiased in its reporting
5. This newspaper does a good job with follow up stories
6. You don't have to worry about accuracy with this newspaper

Consistent with our finding that most people say they trust their local daily newspaper to do a good job, we found trust to be a strong experience. People rated their local daily newspaper fairly high on all six statements above -- this experience rated 7 out of 26 motivating experiences (and one that is positively correlated with readership).

This tells me that while the public may have doubts about the media as a whole, the local paper is by and large spared. For now.

But maybe not for long. Knocking on the door are new media that specialize in trust -- from Craig's List to Angie's List to Trusted Opinion to The Huffington Post or The Daily Kos, the Internet is providing persuasive alternatives to the local newspaper.
At this point in time, newspapers have an asset -- use it wisely!


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.