Content, culture among driving forces in increasing readership

By DAVID GREER
Member Services Director

“Newspapers don’t entirely have to reinvent the wheel.” That was the assessment of Mary Nesbitt of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. Newspapers can continue doing what they already do now but do it better in order to build circulation, Nesbitt added.

Nesbitt, a former editor, spoke at last month’s KPA Summer Convention in Gatlinburg. She spoke at a joint session with members of the Tennessee Press Association. The topic: the Readership Institute, a joint project of the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The institute is dedicated to understanding and promoting ways to grow newspaper readership.

The institute says, based on its research, that newspapers should forget the old excuses about media competition, demographic changes and the “no time to read” excuse. Instead, content, service, brand and culture drive newspaper readership.

The institute surveyed 100 daily newspapers and 37,000 of their readers. Among the 100 papers were two from Kentucky – The Courier-Journal and The Gleaner from Henderson.

The study found eight imperatives for growing readership, each one centered on the four cornerstones of the survey – content, brand, service and culture.

“There were many surprises in the research for me,” Nesbitt said. One involved the amount of free time people had – 24 hours each week.

“People have more free time than I expected,” she said. “They’re just choosing to use it in ways not conducive to us.”

The research, Nesbitt said, applies to newspapers of all sizes. The average person spends 28 minutes reading their newspaper. Readers like the variety of content ranging from serious reporting to the word puzzles.

Some content, research shows, actually drives reader satisfaction higher than other content. Obituaries, community announcements and stories about ordinary people make readers happiest, Nesbitt said. Promoting content regularly also grows readership, she said.

Next, the research showed that readers want lifestyle news. Then, they want coverage of government, politics and international news. News about things to do also ranks highly on the list of reader satisfaction, she said.

The best news, she said, is that decline of newspaper readership is not inevitable. The things that newspapers can control are greater than those things they cannot control, Nesbitt said.

For a complete rundown on the Readership Institute’s survey, see their web site at www.readership.org.

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