By Kevin Downey

   As a paradigm of old media, the newspaper suffers the crudest of measurement tools: circulation. The unstated argument--a deeply flawed one-- was that if lots of people were reading a newspaper it must be a pretty good advertising vehicle.
   Alas, now there emerges a new way of looking at a newspaper that attempts to measure how involved readers are in the publication. The argument--one that makes much more sense--is that a reader who is deeply involved with his or her daily paper probably pays attention to its advertisers.
    This new tool is called the Reader Behavior Score system.
     The RBS should make its way to media planners in the next few years and provide a qualitative measure to evaluate newspapers.
   But it is also serving to help editors figure out how to make their papers more appealing to readers.
   "We believe you have to understand how people use a newspaper. The most significant factors are time spent with a newspaper, the frequency with which it is picked up, and completeness of reading," says Mary Nesbitt, managing director of the Readership Institute.
   "It would clearly be a benefit to an advertiser to know that the newspaper is being picked up more often and people are spending more time with it and looking at more sections."
   The RBS comes from a report called the Impact Study. It was conducted by the Readership Institute at the Media Management Center at Northwestern University with the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was based on the results of 37,000 surveys from 100 newspapers of various sizes.
   Eight specific areas were identified for a newspaper to improve its reader behavior score.
   Among them are improved customer service, an emphasis on content relevant to a newspaper’s audience, more local news about ordinary people, and easier-to-read content and design.
   Other areas for improvement include the relevance of the newspaper brand, in-paper promotion for upcoming features, and even the newspaper’s corporate culture.
   The Impact Study also found that advertisements within a newspaper that appeal to its audience can help build readership.
   "If you can satisfy readers of ads even more, the greater the likelihood that they will read more," says Nesbitt. "In that sense, you can look at readership as the responsibility of not only the editor and publisher but of the ad sales director as well."
   Judith Burrell, senior vice president of communications at the NAA, adds: "The advertising department should work on building ad space so that it’s in balance with the content.
   "It’s part of the whole context in that the drivers of readership are multi-departmental."
    A multi-department focus on readership implies a needed shift in the corporate culture of most newspapers. One of the eight solutions from the Impact Study is a call for constructive cultures, which is a move away from the more territorial defensive cultures that have been the mainstay of newspaper offices for years.
   "In our study, the vast majority of newspapers fell within the defensive culture," says Nesbitt.
   "Constructive newspapers tend to have a higher RBS, though, and a different attitude toward readership issues. They believe that things can be done to reverse the decline of newspaper readership."
   The RBS focuses attention on a newspaper’s readers, which includes anybody who picks up a copy, and away from its circulation, a measure of how many issues are sold, which has been going steadily down.
   In the past decade, for example, daily circulation for weekly newspapers has declined by 10 percent to 56.1 million, according to Veronis, Suhler & Associate’s 2000 Communications Industry Forecast.
    And the drop-off has been particularly steep among the young. Only 40 percent of adults 18-24, for instance, read a weekday newspaper during 1999. That is down from 44 percent in 1998 and compares to over 75 percent readership among adults over 55.
   At the same time, newspapers account for about 31 percent of all ad dollars. That is forecast to go down to 29 percent by 2004 but will still slightly outpace television in total ad dollars.

April 10, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.

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