Newspapers
A better grip on a newspaper's readers
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 24, 2008 - 1:10:25 AM

Getting an idea of newspapers’ readership isn’t easy for media buyers and planners these days. Daily newspaper circulation is expected to decline once again when the Audit Bureau of Circulation releases its second-half 2007 numbers on Monday. Meanwhile, newspapers’ online readership is growing, albeit from a small base, according to data from online measurement firms. To help make sense of these numbers, Scarborough Research released a new report this week that calculates the weekly integrated newspaper audience, including unduplicated print and web readers, and presenting it as a percentage of the adult population in a given market. For example, The Washington Post has a weekly print audience of 2.82 million, or 61 percent of the area population. The web site audience is 1 million, or 22 percent of the DMA. Together, they have an integrated audience of 3.02 million, reaching 66 percent of the market’s 4.59 million adult residents. Gary Meo, senior vice president of the print and digital media division at Scarborough Research, talks to Media Life about the common ties shared by high newspaper and web readership areas, why the internet is so important to papers, and why Northeast papers tend to have higher readership.
 
What did you find most interesting or most surprising about this report?
 
Well, I think what we find most interesting is that newspapers are spending a lot of effort and money to expand their brand onto the internet. So what we’re finding is that newspaper web site audiences are growing.

But at the same time of course, print readership and circulation have been declining. So newspapers are extending their brand and growing their audience online.
 

Can you explain how you arrived at the percentage figures for the integrated audience?
 
What we do is do a telephone survey of adults 18-plus in 81 markets across the country. We asked if they’ve read the printed version of the newspaper in the market and then if they’ve visited the web site. So then we know whether they’ve read the paper, visited online or both. And that allows us to calculate a net unduplicated reach number for the newspaper and its web site.

Were there any areas that had a higher weekly web site audience than print audience? If not, is that something you expect to see in the future, and how long would it take?
 
No there wasn’t. It would be highly unlikely for a web site to get more people than the print product at this point in time. We expect that to change over time, however.
 
But we’re only measuring the audience within the local market. So for the Washington Post, we’re measuring the Washington, D.C., DMA, and clearly they get audience from outside of that area. So there’s a possibility that a web site could have a larger audience if you include out-of-market, but we don’t know that from our data.

Are there any factors that tie together the areas that show high weekly print audience?
 
Well, the areas that show high weekly print audience, they’re traditional things that correlate with paper readership: demographics, especially age, income and education, and it’s education that correlates most highly. So markets that are more educated, an older market, retirement markets -- those kinds of markets in general have higher newspaper readership than those that are younger and not as educated.
 
Interestingly, geography is also a factor. We find that papers in the Northeast and Midwest tend to have higher readership than the West and Southwest, and that’s primarily because they’re competing with the weather.
 

What about factors that tie together areas with high weekly web site audience?
 
In that case, it’s a little bit different. Web site usage and particularly newspaper web usage tends to be tied to the availability of internet access. So markets like San Jose or Washington, D.C., tend to correlate to high web site usage.
 
Also, an educated population correlates highly. And the availability of high-tech jobs and a high-tech economy. So, again, Silicon Valley, or parts of Austin, Texas, where there’s a high-tech business community, those sorts of things correlate with high newspaper web site readership.

There aren't that many two-paper cities left in the U.S. But for DMAs that do have more than one paper, what common threads do you see in newspaper audiences?
 
Well, generally , in most cases with multiple newspapers, you have a big newspaper in town and then the rest of the papers, for the most part, are more locally oriented papers. If you look at Los Angeles, for example, you have the L.A. Times, which covers the market, but then you have the San Fernando Valley Daily News, etc.
 
Research shows that most people are most interested in reading about local news in their local newspaper. And we find that to be generally true for the web sites as well.

What's the most important thing media buyers and planners can learn from this report?
 
Well, a couple things. One is that newspapers are clearly more than just their printed daily paper. Newspapers have done a great job of expanding their brand online, and are pioneers at doing it. So that’s clearly important.
 
The other thing is that we try to split this into a format that would be easy for a planner or buyer to get a feel of what a paper’s total coverage is within its market. But the key message is that papers are more than simply their printed daily product.