(Mary Nesbitt)

At times, I feel like an old fuddy-duddy because we continue to call ourselves the Readership Institute. I can see the pity in some folks' eyes. Readership… print media… words… so 20th Century…

But in fact we think of readership far more expansively, since most news media require the use of one's eyes. And no one has come up with a better word. ("Audience" is too passive. "Users" is kind of seedy. "Consumers" is crass. "Prosumers" - not even a word.)

We also measure readership expansively. Researchers here developed and tested Reader Behavior Scores (RBS) seven years ago and we do a national study of 100 local daily newspapers at regular intervals.

RBS measures not just use of the paper, but how "occupied" a person is when reading it. Instead of only asking how frequently a person reads the paper, or whether s/he read it yesterday, the RBS panel of questions also includes time spent and completeness. Combining those factors gives a richer sense of the attachment readers have and a different way to evaluate their worth. (Is a person who reads every day in a typical week, but spends little time with the newspaper and only looks at a small part of it better than the person who only reads three days but spends a lot of time and reads all of it? It depends on what you're trying to achieve. It also means you could produce a different kind of product for different reading types.)

So here's the buried lede: We just released the results of our latest RBS study and it seems that, when seasonal differences are taken into account, RBS has been holding pretty steady over the last several years. (The markets we measure, by the way are not the Top 50 or 100 as in syndicated research, but a representative sample of the newspaper industry as a whole, ranging from small to very large. They are the same markets in which we conducted the Impact study in 2000.)

When research director Limor Peer and researcher Bob LeBailly produced the analysis of the data, my first reaction was "how can this be?" After all, press reports portray readers (whom journalists often confuse with subscribers) as fleeing newspapers in droves. Data from the Newspaper Association of America, measuring the Top 50 markets, show continuing, small, year-over-year readership declines.

Then I reminded myself of two things. First, RBS rolls up three aspects of reading into one metric that gets at how people use the newspaper, not just whether they did or not. Comparing RBS with other readership metrics is like comparing apples and oranges. Second, the markets we measure represent the population of newspapers in the country, many of which are small, much more attuned to their communities, and much more nimble in responding to their readers than their big-city counterparts.

Another piece of good news: People generally have a high level of trust in their local daily newspaper. About 75 per cent of the 3,000-plus people we surveyed said they trust the paper to do a good job most of the time or nearly always. (Only 30% feel the same about the government in Washington). People with higher RBS tend to trust the newspaper more and to be more involved in civic activity. Engagement with a trusted local brand and involvement in civic life seem to go hand-in-hand, regardless of age.

Interestingly, young people tend to think differently about participating in civic life than do older people. The former put more importance on things like volunteering or donating to a worthy cause, while the latter emphasize voting and keeping up with current affairs. How many newspapers show younger people how they can get involved in the life of the community in the ways they seem to prefer? Show younger people doing these things? Build a network and resources around such interests?

The new study points to other opportunities.

Local daily newspaper Web sites generally still aren't well-known and well-used, especially in smaller markets. This represents an unexploited (rather than lost) opportunity for newspapers - a trusted brand, as this study shows - to capture some of those people who don't read the print product and never will, or who prefer to go online to get their local news and information, or who might visit your Web site(s) if you offered something unique, relevant and different from print. (For an example of the last point, look at the recently-launched www.boomergirl.com, from the same folks who brought us www.lawrence.com and who publish the Journal-World in Lawrence, KS - three very different products with different definitions of "news" and strategies to enhance their readers' involvement and "experiences" with their brand.)

We also notice some age-related behaviors online that indicate different strategies for younger adults.

To start with, those who do access the newspaper's Web site tend to be younger (and more educated and of higher income). They are more likely to trade goods (search the site for ads, click on a link in an ad) and monitor conversations (read a blog, click on a link in a blog, click on a link to "most e-mailed" stories). They consider the ability to manage services and to control or "pull" information (such as subscribe to an RSS feed or other news summary) to be more important than do older adults - and this is an area where newspapers under-perform.

In short, younger adults are more active and expect to be able to do it all. This demands expansive thinking from newspapers.

Speaking of expansiveness, we've also developed similar measures of readership for online and magazines and experiences for those platforms too. Later this year we'll release new experience research on television news, and new experience research about how teens use news Web sites.

Getting insights into how people use news media, rather than just whether or not they use it, continues to be part of our expansive and expanding agenda.


By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.