Newspapers should grow readership, even if it means giving papers away, speaker tells convention attendees
By DAVID GREER
Member Services Director

The average reader spends 28 minutes a day with their newspaper. If you find comfort in that number, think again. In comparison, the average person spends 3-and-a-half hours a day watching television.

Those were just some of the results of a project begun four years ago at the Readership Institute, John Lavine, the institute’s director, told KPA convention attendees in Lexington in late January. In addition to being director of the Readership Institute, Lavine was the founding director of the Media Management Center, both at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He is a professor of media management and strategy in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and the Medill School of Journalism.

With newspaper readership declining nationally since 1964, Lavine said, circulation is a bad measure for tracking success. Instead, he said, newspapers should be measuring readership — specifically, they should measure pass along, how many times each copy is read.

Concentrating on growing pass along can produce double-digit readership growth in the next 12 months at most papers, Lavine said.

“Put papers anywhere you can even if it means giving them away in some places,” he said.

Advertisers are far more concerned about how many people read a newspaper and how many come in their business as a result.

Despite obstacles to growing readership, Lavine said there are many ways in which publishers and editors can reverse the decades -long readership decline. The four cornerstones to readership growth, Lavine said, are content, brand, service and culture. The cornerstones apply to newspapers of all sizes, he said.

Lavine named nine categories of content that grows readership:

1. Local news about community and ordinary people. (Readers want intensely local content.)
2. Health, home, food, fashion and travel.
3. Politics, government and war.
4. Natural disasters and accidents. (But readers want fewer photos and stories about these events.)
5. News about movies, television and the weather. (These stories need to be shorter and less complex. Readers want information on how to seek escape/entertainment.)
6. Business, economics and personal finance.
7. Science, technology and the environment.
8. Police, crime and the judicial system. (Readers want fewer stories of these.)
9. Sports (At all levels.)


Lavine offered more advice — putting these nine categories of stories in the paper alone won’t grow readership. The writing must be interesting. Avoid the inverted pyramid when possible, he said. People enjoy a feature approach to writing. Write most stories about trends and follow-ups. Don’t tell readers something has been passed or implemented. Tell them if it’s working.

“Determine what’s really important to people and then tell it in that style,” Lavine said.
Papers should do a better job of promoting their content, he said. Concentrate on telling readers what’s coming up in the paper. Television does this well, most papers don’t, Lavine said.

Readers, he said, make little distinction between news and advertising content. It’s all information in their minds. Research, he said, actually shows a greater satisfaction level with ad content compared to news content. Improve ad content and readers will have a greater level of satisfaction with the paper, he said.

Good customer service also drives readership, Lavine said, as does improving each newspaper’s brand. Sadly, newspapers are often like the military and hospitals, he said. They are very resistant to change or creativity.

Improving a newspaper’s culture improves its employee satisfaction and that often improves customer satisfaction, Lavine said.

For more information on building brand, service and culture, see the Readership Institute’s Web site at www.readership.org.