It's a weekly world
Research compiled by Clyde Bentley
Who reads what, when do they read it and who pays for it? Core measurements of the news business are keeping researchers and media managers busy this fall.
Daily? What daily? - Several years ago an audience researcher told me "America is a country of weekly newspapers. We just throw in six other days with the subscription." His point was that the Sunday edition was what Americans really wanted to read.
Now a new study for the Suburban Newspapers of America by the Reynolds Journalism Institute gives credence to the quip -- and then some. Initial date from 11 'burbs across the United States show 64% of respondents prefer the Sunday metro papers for local news. Coming in second with 58% were free local weekly papers. Weekday metro dailies were down the list at 56%. What's obvious is that a once-a-week good read is the niche in which a substantial number of people put print newspapers. But given the drive for 24/7, nano-second immediacy based on our Web editions, what's a media manager to do? Now pass the Tums, and maybe the Mylanta too when you add another set of stats: Internet news viewing by suburbanites is slightly down from a 2006 study and only 44% said they went online for local news in the previous 24 hours.
The figures won't be finalized until the researchers hit their goal of 3,000 interviews sometime in the next six weeks. Stay tuned for the final results, which will document the growing impact of suburban newspapers. The success of the suburban print and online newspapers has more importance than its face value when you consider that every one of them has competition from a metro daily. Contact lead RJI researcher Ken Fleming for details.
Who pays? - If you want to see fur fly in the news circles these days, just whisper "pay wall." The arguments over whether online news should be free or whether newspapers and broadcast outlets should use the traditional newspaper subscription model have raged for several years, but hit a fever pitch this week with the release of an American Press Institute study. The common thinking for several years has been that charging readers to access news on the Web is ludicrous as the readers will just find the news free elsewhere.
There is little "common" about the thinking now, as shown in an Itz Publishing/Belden Interactive study for the American Press Institute. The study polled only 118 news executives, but showed that a scant majority -- 51% -- believe they can successfully charge for online content. However, they generally have no firm plans to raise the pay wall soon and came to no consensus of what "paid access" means. Their ideas ranged from monthly subscriptions to per-article micropayments to a hefty 13% who "don't know."
A graph from the study reporting what readers might do if the paper charges for online content was the source of considerable discussion on the media blogs. Researchers Greg Harmon and Greg Swanson compared data from the small survey of news executives to similar questions on a much larger study of readers conducted by Belden earlier this year. The news executives said readers would most likely turn to the print newspapers if they couldn't get online news from the paper's site and if that didn't work go to other local media Web sites. However, people who are currently online news site visitors said they would go to other local Internet sites or turn on the television. The printed edition of the paper was the information life ring for only 30% of the respondents.
Perhaps the better discussion should be over the finding that 68% of the news execs think it would be hard for the public to replace the content they now get free online, but only 48% of the public thought the same. The accuracy of either perception probably depends on the type of market the paper serves. In a big city or its nearby suburbs, local news is at least marginally covered by TV, radio and a few independent Web sites. But in the smaller cities and towns that comprise Middle America, reporters are few and far between. The current aggregation of local news by independent online sites becomes moot if the work of the single substantial crew of journalists -- newspaper staffers -- is unavailable.
The API survey is still very much a work in progress. So far, only 118 of the 2,400 executives contacted actually took the survey. That leaves considerable room for change.
Universal metrics - Publishers may hope that readers will someday underwrite online news, but right now the major source of revenue is from advertising. But the advertisers aren't all that happy with the cacophony of statistics we use to entice them. Fourteen of the nation's biggest advertisers formed the Council for Innovative Media Measurement this month out of frustration with the conflicting audience measurement statistics. The creation of CIMM is a direct shot at ratings giant Nielsen, but caught the attention of everyone for whom the term "metric" means more than centimeters and kilos.
Fudging the audience stats is a media tradition we seldom like to talk about, but it drove the creation of Audited Circulation Bureau, Nielsen ratings and Google Analytics. But while it was one thing to physically count the newspapers coming off the press, calculating the number of people actually watching a newscast or reading a Web story is another. Various techniques to measure the same audience often produce wildly different numbers, which was the more compelling part of the API study. For years Greg Harmon has warned of the "stadium syndrome" in current metrics that discounts the impact of loyal readers in favor of any click that goes through the digital turnstile. Harmon and I presented a paper in 2004 outlining this effect, but the back half of Harmon's latest presentation reaffirms his warning that media industry shouldn't bet the bank on the Web numbers it now reports.
The new emphasis on online metrics could have a chilling effect on digital media operations we all love. Harmon points out that news sites in most markets consistently say they have more "unique visitors" than warm bodies in the local population. The CIMM people with the money have taken their mantra from Missouri: Show me. That means Website managers need to make a logic-driven and defensible reexamination at who really reads their output.
Political edge - We may question online metrics, but news folks have always loved Gallup polls. And when then great pollster says people enjoy what we report, how can you not be happy?
A new Gallup poll on popular interest in national political news shows that Americans are keeping their eye on Washington more keenly than in any year without a presidential election this decade. The 36% of Americans who say they follow national politics "very closely" is down from the 43% during the Obama campaign, but matches the level during the 2004 election. Sure, the 36% who put politics high on their agenda is only about a third of the potential audience, another 42% say they follow politics "somewhat closely." That gives some credence to the emphasis many media outlets place on political news.
But (there always seems to be a but...) there is that age, education and income thing that researchers call socio-economic class. Only 19% of the 18-29 generation, 26% of the never-been-to-college folk and 26% of the people who earn less than $30,000 say they follow politics closely. That comes on the heels of another poll (this one by CareerBuilder.com) showing that 61% of American workers live paycheck-to-paycheck to make ends meet. That's a substantial jump from the 49 percent last year and the 43% in the 2007 poll. A frightening aside in the latest study is that 30% of people with six-figure salaries say they, too, just scrape buy until the next paycheck.
What was that political slogan? "It's the economy, stupid."
Talk about numbers - One final look at statistics that count comes from my current research on mobile phones and journalism. While we chuckle at that crowd of Verizon techs on the tube or admire the bouncing apps on iPhones, the cell phone battle that could decide how we call is brewing in China.
China has 687 million wireless subscribers - twice the entire population of the U.S. - but only three cell phone companies. The largest of these, China Mobile, surprised many observers recently by adopting the Symbian operating system as one of its primary platforms. Symbian is what Nokia phones have used for years, but even the Finns were edging away from it and most of the buzz has been about the iPhone, Google's Android, Pal and the RIM-powered Blackberries. China Mobile immediately opened a Symbian app store to serve its 500,000 subscribers. Half a billion customers in your pocket gives you a definite marketing edge.
But the crumbs left over from the Symbian deal ain't all that skimpy. Unicom, the No. 2 mobile operator in China, cut a deal to bring the iPhone - albeit stripped of Wi-Fi connectivity - to its 141 million subscribers. That's nearly twice the number of customers that AT&T has in the U.S.
The obvious newsroom impact of the China mobile phone story is that the U.S. smartphone horserace we so often write about may actually be settled by overwhelming numbers elsewhere. It also demonstrates the blazing speed at which the status of technology changes. The best hedge for newsrooms searching for a mobile strategy may be platform agnosticism - focus on the concepts rather than the vendors.
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E-mail - bentleycl@missouri.edu Twitter: http://twitter.com/MizzouBentley