The Key To Building Newspaper Circulation – Give Readers More Of The Stories They Want, But Do Editors And The Public See Eye To Eye On Those Choices?

Philip M. Stone March 15, 2007

It’s really a simple marketing exercise – find out what people want and sell it to them. Trouble is when it comes to the newspaper business do we really know what the public wants? There is help on the way to figure that out, and if you’re an old-time editor who believes you know that without being told, you may want to think that one again.

The Seattle Times recently asked readers for their views about newspapers and it was somewhat surprising how passionate about newspapers many of those readers were. But perhaps the best advice came from an unidentified email:

“The purpose of the newspaper has always been to keep people informed of events around the world as well as though in our backyard. Events that directly and indirectly affect us and the rest of humanity and our planet….The best newspapers are diligent, unbiased, and serve no one but their readers, the general public – not always telling them what they want to know, but what they NEED to know. If you do these things wholeheartedly you will offer the reader something the Internet cannot: substance …Do not underestimate the public.”

And there the role of the editor is very plain – it is the editor who chooses those stories that the public “needs” to know. That’s why the editor gets the big bucks. But are they serving their public as well as they might?

Newspapers with circulations under 50,000 are the one sector that is doing very well in spite of all the headlines of how badly newspapers in general are doing these days. The reason most given for their success is that they concentrate on the local story, the story that touches readers the most in their communities,  whether it be the decisions of the zoning commission, how much the property tax is going up, or how the local high school football team is doing. 

Those newspapers have always relied on local display advertising rather than classifieds so the likes of Craigslist didn’t really hurt, it is local business display advertising to local reader. There are good reasons why GateHouse Media keeps buying up smaller circulation newspapers (they picked up nine Copley newspapers in the Midwest just this week for $380 million) and why Macquarie Media from Australia has bought newspapers in the Southwest US and is looking for more.

But it’s when you get into the larger circulation newspapers that things become more difficult. Editors have that responsibility, as the lady’s email said, of keeping “people informed of events around the world as well as those in our backyard.” That’s a whole lot more story choice to make and do editors really understand what is most important to their readers.

For those newspapers that are part of the NewspaperDirect program, there is a new tool available that can now really match editor’s choices with readers’ preferences. 

A news release for its PressDisplay.com sets the scene: “Editors design a newspaper’s layout to present news based on the news value of each story. Among the factors they consider in this decision are the location of the article (e.g. on the front page or on the front of a section), the length of the story; the number, size, and color of pictures; headline size; and the number of reporters that contributed to the story. Layout design is an art that can dramatically affect which story – or which newspaper – people choose.

“Within PressDisplay.com readers use a slider bar to progressively move their view of the news from Editor’s Picks to Readers’ Choice. To understand which articles are of most interest to readers, PressDisplay.com tracks the reading time on any given article. It measures which parts of a newspaper page – text of articles, related pictures and even advertisements – get the most attention. This is far more accurate than measuring click-throughs (readers may click on an appealing headline and then lose interest in the story behind the headline) or voting systems (readers tend to base their vote on whether they agree with the article, not necessarily based on its pure interest value.) PressDisplay.com also uses a variety of techniques to determine whether a reader read the article entirely.”

There are already some findings from a pilot test that will not bring joy to the editor’s chair. Front page stories do okay but they are seldom the “most interesting” according to readers. Many stories on inside pages do better than front page stories. The smart editor will look for trends in stories that most appeal.

Sports is the prime section for the biggest difference between editor picks and reader preference.  And sad as it may sound to a newsman, among the five top items chosen by readers are crossword puzzles and Sudoku. “Given the number of eyeballs that the games and cartoon pages attract, these are clearly opportunities for advertising,” Newspaper Direct notes.

Naturally PressDisplay.com, which now shows some 450 publications from around the world, wants to use this tool to entice more newspapers into its fold and for the number of subscribers to its site to increase. And since the site is global rather than local, user preferences could well differ from what the local community may choose. But the idea of the system is very good in being able to track reader preferences, and it doesn’t hurt for an editor to have such a comparison. Right now all most editors have is a note from circulation saying the numbers are down without saying why.

Of course there are editors out there who very seriously believe that they know best, and none of this research is necessary.  Common sense and a long-time news nose is all it takes to run the right stories in the right place. Maybe that was true when there wasn’t so much competition out there, but in today’s newspaper world with print circulations continually slipping, and so many information choices out there for the news consumer, maybe having a tool that tells reader preferences on a daily basis isn’t such a bad thing!

If it reinforces what is already being done then fine, but if it does show differences between that news nose and the news consumer, then few products have ever been hurt by listening to the consumer.