 Media Management Center MediaInfoCenter McCormick Fellows Kellogg School of Management Medill |
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| Satisfaction Drivers in Key Content Areas | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The
importance of editorial content in building long-term readership comes
as no surprise. What is interesting is how sensitive readers are to improvements
in editorial content. Whether content is seen as poor or very good, any
improvement in content leads to more time spent with the paper, more frequent
and complete reading.
If increasing satisfaction improves readership, the next step is to understand how newspapers can improve content. The typical approach to this question would be to ask readers what they would want in news coverage. The problem with asking readers is that they can have difficulty articulating their preferences or simply want more of everything. Ask readers if they would like more politics, sports or movie coverage and they often say "yes, yes, yes" without really thinking about what would make them spend more time with the newspaper. The Impact study employed an innovative technique that unearthed the content practices that truly lead to increased satisfaction. At the same time that 37,000 consumers in 100 newspaper markets were being asked how satisfied they were with their local newspaper's content, Readership Institute staff studied copies of those same newspapers to measure how editorial coverage differs. The content analysis measured a wide range of differences including quantity, length, writing style, local/non-local focus, use of staff or wire copy, use of visuals including photographs and graphics and many others. (Go to our Newspaper Content Analysis Overview Page for more on this.) The Readership Institute then used this detailed information about editorial content to find out what high-satisfaction newspapers are doing differently from low-satisfaction papers. The grid below details the "high satisfaction" practices for each topic area. The practices for increasing overall satisfaction appear in the third column, practices that particularly appeal to women, younger readers and light readers appear in the columns on the right. In community announcements, for example, papers with high satisfaction overall offered more community announcements coverage and also offered a section geared for young people. Those newspapers that had particularly high satisfaction with women also included larger photographs as part of their community announcement coverage. It's important to remember that any difference in content (length, amount, local/non-local focus, etc.) could have increased satisfaction. This table reports only those practices that have shown to be statistically significant in increasing satisfaction. Many people ask if using the high satisfaction practices for women, Younger readers or light readers will antagonize men, older readers and heavy readers. We did not find this to be true. In none of the cases did we find that an editorial approach that increased satisfaction with one group would lower satisfaction with another.
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Additional Information
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