(Steve Duke)

At the risk of this page looking like the Lee Abrams' cheering section, I'm going to pick up where colleague Mary Nesbitt left off a couple weeks ago with a new memo from Abrams that was posted to Romenesko this week.

Abrams, Tribune Co.'s new chief innovation officer, is a bit of a lightening rod for newspaper journalists because he comes from broadcast, writes in ransom-note style, and seems to be constantly wagging his finger at the professionals.

But much of what he is saying isn't new and shouldn't be surprising. He's pointing out things we've learned on the job or that studies - including ours at the Readership Institute - have shown newspapers for years, but that we have failed to act on.

This is an urgent time for the industry. MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton warned in a speech to the World Newspaper Congress earlier this month, that "survival is not guaranteed" and predicted that "some newspapers in the U.S. won’t make it through this transition." (You can find the entire speech in the coverage by BusinessWeek's Jon Fine.)

Meanwhile, Alan Mutter in his Confessions of a Newsosaur analyzed the numbers behind McClatchy's layoff this week of 10 percent of its workforce and concluded that the savings will cover just 23.7 percent of MNI's anticipated revenue shortfall. More pain is just around the corner.

So instead of mocking Abrams, we should look at what he says and how it fits into what we know.

"If grocery stores were organized like newspapers, you'd wear out your shoes looking for vegetables, as carrots would be in aisle 6, tomatoes in aisle 8, etc..."

Abrams was observing that the Los Angeles Times covered entertainment business extensively, but by scattering the stories throughout the paper lost the opportunity to establish itself as the entertainment business authority. He recommended that newspapers work harder to compartmentalize stories, particularly on topics they want to own, so the heft of coverage is obvious.

We've been making the same point in workshops, seminars and speeches around the country since 2000. Our original Impact Study found that making the paper easier to read was a key driver of readership, and an element of "easy to read" was improved navigation, which includes clustering stories on the same topic.

But I didn't need the Impact Study to tell me this. I remember focus groups from 20 or more years ago when I worked at the Chicago Sun-Times telling us we didn't have much national or international coverage, then being surprised by its volume when we took them through the paper page-by-page and pointed out the stories. It wasn't organized, so they didn't think there was much of it - exactly Abrams' point.

Related to this issue of "easy to read," Abrams wrote:

"Newspapers have a habit of making things SO hard to read absorb and engage in. We're in the age of Media ease. Make it hard, and they'll go away faster than a CD buyer.

His observation is spot-on. Ease of reading is at the heart of readership, and it has a lot of components beyond organizing stories by topic. For more see this from the Impact Study.

"90% of the Section indexes are throwaways... afterthoughts. Take a look. It's sort of like 'Oh... incidentally, here's what's inside.' These are DRIVERS."

He's right on both counts. Promotion is a readership driver (it's an element of "easy to read"), and yes, newspapers do a bad job with indexes, reefers, skyboxes and other promotions. Too often they are throwaways promoting routine news coverage or standing features instead of high-impact, exclusive content.

Every newspaper should make promotions the responsibility of a high-ranking editor who recognizes their importance. Further, the promos should be created by the paper's best designers and wordsmiths - as they are at magazines.

For guidance that we have offered on improving promotion since 2000 see this, this, this, this, and this.

"Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news... Because the paper 'assumed' I knew. ...People DON'T know that you have REAL people exclusively reporting, because we ASSUME they do."

OK, it sounds a little silly that he didn't know there were actual people on the ground doing this work. But in context, it's clear he is saying he didn't know it was Tribune Co. reporters (note the word "exclusively" in his quote), as opposed to generic wire reports. His point is that exclusivity is worth bragging about.

Two of our studies support his point. As noted above, the Impact Study made it clear that content promotion is a strong driver of readership, and what he is talking about is content promotion.

Also supporting his specific point about connecting readers with journalists, our 2003 Newspaper Experience Study found that one of the experiences that drives readership is feeling a connection with the journalist. In our research, readers said things like "I feel like I get to know the people writing the articles" and "I look forward to reading certain writers in this newspaper."

You can improve that connection by promotion, and by featuring the journalist's picture, providing a brief bio, including email addresses and phone numbers. (Here's an example from The Day in New London, Conn.)

"LIBERATE THE PHOTOGRAPHERS... Or at least do everything in your power to maximize this STRENGTH."

Crikey! Why does a radio guy need to point this out to us in 2008? We've got stacks of studies going back to Poynter's original "Eyes on the News" eye-tracking study in 1991, shouting the importance of photos and other visuals to readers. Yet most newsrooms are managed by people who came up on the "word" side, so in the tug between photos and text, text usually wins.

"Don't look to other papers (except foreign ones). YOU are in the position to re-invent. If you look at other papers... you'll continue to live in the past."

The follow-the-leader nature of the industry has been one of my biggest frustrations as I have conducted workshops about our research around the country for the past eight years. At every session someone says some variant of "Yeah, great ideas. But tell me who has implemented any of these ideas and seen success." Actually, the comment is usually even narrower: Who of my circulation size has done this successfully? Everyone wants to follow someone else's template. No one wants to lead.

Except, as Abrams hints, abroad. I have never heard that question in the workshops I've done in Europe. My colleagues don't hear that question in Latin America. Instead we've seen experimentation, trial-and-error, risk-taking and innovation outside the U.S.

Further to Abrams' point, as groundbreaking and valuable as our original Impact Study was, it is limited because it only measured what newspapers were currently doing, so only tells us how to do those things better. It's like trying to drive your car forward by looking in the rearview mirror. The value of the Experience Study is that it gives insights into reader behavior and motivation that can help us innovate things we haven’t done.

"Tweaking will kill you. Aggressively and NOTICEABLY changing the look and feel can and most likely WILL grow you."

It takes a lot of change before readers notice anything. We did some work a few years ago with a mid-size newspaper that made what it thought were bold, aggressive, mold-breaking changes - so radical, they said, that they worried about turning off loyal readers. Then we talked to focus groups about the newspaper. No one - not a single person - had noticed the changes. What journalists think is major change is unnoticeable to the average reader.

"The biggest problem is lack of urgency."

Hazel Reinhardt, our director of market research at the Media Management Center, has been using a chart in our executive education programs since about 2000 that tracked the slow newspaper circulation decline of one-half to 1 percent per year through the '70s, '80s and '90s - then predicted a dramatic tumble off a cliff in about 2006. Nobody believed her, but here we are with most newspapers showing losses every ABC reporting period of 3, 4, and 5 percent - even into double-digits in some markets. Now can we get urgent?

This failure to take action on what we know is a consequence of newspapers' change-resistant culture, which my colleague Vickey Williams writes about frequently. This change resistance is at the heart of the pummeling Abrams takes. It could doom newspapers.


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 Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.