(Steve Duke)

I just read yet another newspaper story about the decline in readership, but this one caught my attention because it was a little different.

"Where have the newspaper readers gone?" the headline asked. This community paper had conducted a survey of about 10 percent of the population of its market and found that a whopping 60 percent said they never read the paper.

That's a much higher figure for non-readers than we find in our RBS studies, which range from 29 percent to 36 percent, depending on the time of year the survey is fielded and other variables.

What made the story interesting is that it was in the student-produced school newspaper for a middle-school in an affluent Chicago suburb. The community is populated by smart, engaged professionals, the kind of people who pay attention to the news and where newspapers probably come into most homes. Yet their 7th and 8th grade children find little use for the newspaper that should most touch their lives.

My immediate thought was that these youngsters are so Web-ingrained that they don't have much use for print media, but after further reading I think the issue is one common to the rest of the industry. After all, 40 percent of the students do read the paper.

So why are rest turned off? The student journalists got a lot of survey responses that will remind you of your own research findings.

"Some of the students that did read [the newspaper] focused on reading only Ask AJ [an advice column], horoscopes, polls, and other articles that were a quick read. The actual news articles were not read a lot," the story said.

Asked why they don't read, survey respondents said:

• "I don't have time."


• "I just don't want to."


• "Our [home room] doesn't get [the newspaper]." (Sounds like the distribution problems many professional newspapers fight.)


• Students also said the stories were too long and many were "not easy to read."

Student suggestions for improving the paper:

• "It should look pretty."


• "There should be more games."


• "More funny articles."


• "Coupons for the cafeteria."


• And the typeface should be bigger.

These students were telling their newspaper the same things we heard in our Impact and New Readers studies.

• The first imperative in the original Impact study was to have excellent service, including responsive distribution.


• Making the paper easier to read was Impact finding. Students objected to long stories, narrow columns that made stories seem even longer, a small typeface. Easy to read also means including more actionable information, which this school paper could certainly benefit from.


• Cafeteria coupons would fall into the category of useful advertising, another of the original Impact imperatives.


• A number of the survey responses get directly at imperative six: "build a positive brand that has relevance to readers." Positive brand attributes we found included being helpful, satisfying readers' need to be informed and in the know about the local community in ways that are relevant to them. Being fun, creative and energetic also drive brand ("more funny stories" might be responsive in this case).

Attention to some of these baseline Impact findings would undoubtedly improve this paper's readership, but attention to the reader experience findings is necessary to drive engagement.

Compare the things the students said about the paper with a list of experiences from the study and you find direct links:

• Personal timeout – "more games"


• Something to talk about – "games, more funny stories." "I just don't want to" read it also probably is saying there isn't much here I want to discuss with my friends.


• Looks out for my interests – Also probably related to "I just don't want to" read it.


• Makes me smarter about things I care about – ditto


• Turned on by surprise and humor – "more funny stories."


• Ad usefulness – "coupons for the cafeteria."

There are other experiences on our list that relate to the survey results, but you get the point. Experience drives (or inhibits if the experiences are negative) readership in newspapers, magazines, online, and television. It matters for adults, and it clearly applies to young teens when it comes to their media use, whether it's their student newspaper, or your Web site. It trumps almost everything else, including localness in this case.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Medill.