First in a series of cover articles for Hora
de Cierre by Michael P. Smith
Managing Director, Media Management Center
In France, four daily age-specific newspapers have a combined circulation of over 200,000 readers each day – some as young as five and the oldest at age 16.
In Guatemala, Nuestro Diario, which did not exist five years ago, has become the No. 1 circulation daily in the country by carving out a middle-market niche.
In Japan, the No. 2 daily – Asahi Shimbun – is the No. 1 newspaper delivered to cellular telephones. It has more than 1.2 million subscribers to the newspaper who get it sent to their phones.
These are just three examples of innovations taking place world-wide as companies struggle to grow by finding new readers. As information becomes more plentiful and new technologies emerge, newspapers are continually challenged to come up with new ideas and new approaches to remain relevant and useful to readers. Newspapers today find themselves at the intersection of great demographic shifts and the introduction and adaptation of new technology.
The greatest and most important demographic shift worldwide is the decline of newspaper reading among young people. We began to see this first with the Baby Boom (post World War II) generation in the United States , but it is now true in Latin America , Europe and most of Asia – teenagers and young adults are reading less frequently.
Why innovate?
Studies by the Readership Institute at Northwestern's Media Management Center and elsewhere suggest that it will be increasingly difficult to reach young readers. There are some common threads to all of the research:
Young people feel a disconnect from the issues and stories that dominate news and excite journalists – stories of conflict and details of intricate governmental policy.
Young people see the daily newspaper as elitist and not relevantly reflecting their interests or the lives of people they know.
Young people see most news coverage as dark and bleak – filled with gloomy reality and an unpromising future.
Young people see the news as full of political spin and hidden agendas – and therefore they are distrustful of the messenger.
Young people see too much moralizing in the newspaper. In America , young people feel as if the newspaper is preaching to them. “We want a conversation, not a sermon,” they say.
Young people say that newspapers are too complex, too big, too unwieldy and difficult to understand. They live a busy, hectic lifestyle and the format of traditional journalism does not fit that lifestyle.
Young people say that there is no sense of fun, energy or innovation in newspapers. Some refer to newspapers as a deadwood medium. |
As a result of these attitudes newspapers have a very tough future, unless they can prove to young people that there is much more to the newspaper than what the young people perceive. Earl Wilkinson, executive director of the International Newspaper Marketing Association, is very forceful: “Overwhelming statistical evidence suggests that failure to reverse the generational decline in youth readership will lead to the end of daily newspaper readership before the end of this century.”
Newspapers should not feel helpless against these trends. Readership Institute research shows a clear path for the future. Our research suggests:
Adults
who read the newspaper as children, or whose parents
read a newspaper, report higher levels of readership
now than do their counterparts who did not grow
up with a newspaper in the home.
And, 18 to 44-year-olds who had newspapers in the classroom as elementary or junior high school students have higher readership now than those who did not.
The editors of the youth dailies
in France and the mid-market dailies like Nuestro
Diario in Guatemala and Primera Hora in Puerto
Rico should feel confident about their future.
Even if there were no indication that those newspapers
were financial successes today – and our information
is that they are all successful – they are doing
the right thing for their companies because they
are investing in the future. By getting newspapers
into the hands of children and into their homes
today, these newspapers will be rewarded 15 years
from now. It is a longterm investment.
Youth and innovation strategies
Innovation is not new to newspapers. Tribune has “innovation” as one of its values, and the company has been an innovator since the early days of legendary owner Col. Robert R. McCormick. The most respected newspapers in the United States also have innovation strategies. Karen Elliot House, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, says the Journal's strategy is fairly straightforward: “We don't define innovation as some breakthrough invention or dramatic change but rather as a continual process of constructive change.
At The Wall Stree Journal, innovation means constantly seeking to understand the evolving needs and interests of our business readers and keep the content of the Journal vital to those needs.”
At the Washington Post, Publisher Donald Graham says his company approaches innovation more cautiously: “We've never been particularly good at conceptualizing some grand vision of the future. We've relied on a set of core values and commitments that have brought the Post in the past 70 years from a bankruptcy court to a sound business enterprise and a reliable journalistic franchise. We were among the first American newspaper companies to branch out into television – beginning in the late 1940s – and for many years our television station group generated the lion's share of profits for The Washington Post Company. In broadcasting as in print, our commitment to quality journalism has been the mainstay of our business strategy. Our stations consistently rank Number One in their markets for local news, and this special connection with the local community has translated into some of the best overall ratings and financial results of any network-affiliated stations in America .”
What is new about innovation today is that large, powerful brands with deep resources, such as Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are the exceptions. They are among the few who can dare move slowly in transforming their newspapers. Most newspapers need to move quickly and they need to be much more dramatic about the change.
The Media Management Center 's work with newspapers in the Americas and across the world, and our research through the Readership Institute, have led us to develop a series of strategic mandates for newspaper survival:
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Newspapers must have a young reader strategy to succeed in the long run. Any one product or offering is likely to reach only part of the market and leave the media company without an offering that appeals to an audience that is important to advertisers. Some companies have been very slow to realize that markets and audiences have fragmented.
Newspapers must become cradle-to-grave information companies. The current newspaper is just one possible product offering and is likely to be insufficient to meet reader and advertiser needs as time goes by. There are some great examples of cradle-to-grave thinking in Latin America . Clarin in Buenos Aires , for example, has a whole array of print products along the age spectrum – from very young readers to young adults. The key to the cradle-to-grave approach is that all of the products, while independent of the mothership must support the brand of the mothership. Even at Asahi Shimbun, with it million cell phone subscribers, the strategy is to migrate young cell phone users (primarily men in their 20s) to the core newspaper because the core newspaper is so profitable that it feeds the rest of the company.
The right new product or products (and technologies) depend on the readers in each market. When the Tribune launched RedEye, a young urban commuter daily in Chicago , they found that the “Metro” approach was not enough for young Chicagoans. These new readers wanted more local news and local columnists. The Tribune was also able to leverage a powerful Internet entertainment site, MetroMix.com, which it launched in 1996, with co-branded pages in RedEye. Not all newspapers would have the same appetite for news, an Internet brand to leverage and a built-in distribution system (the elevated train line). But the approach was right for Chicago .
Young people use multiple media – and often at the same time. The fact that cellular telephones are ubiquitous is evidence enough that young people are different. Technology is intuitive to them and they respect the medium that uses technology to include them in the coverage. Many young people do not remember life without the Internet; for them the World Wide Web is a shopping tool, a research tool and a communication device. Vanguardia in Saltillo , Mexico , has incorporated the Web and the new digital cameras into getting young people to share photographs of parties, birthdays and school events. The information is repurposed into a large Sunday youth social magazine called Joven.
All newspapers will require a major re-thinking. The Readership Institute is pretty clear: You need a revolution, not an evolution. The newspaper has to be re-examined from cover to cover and re-created to appeal to and become relevant for the young disaffected audience. Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) saw the writing on the wall three years ago. Sweden is a highly literate and highly technological country. Yet its top newspapers had seen steady decline of readership from 1980 to 2000. When the Schibsted Group of Norway took over the management of SvD, the editors had to face up to the fact that large numbers of young adults were not reading the newspaper. They underwent a revolution – they re-thought the role of the newspaper, they converted it to tabloid, changed the sections and changed the story. They adopted a 3-30-3 rule – they wanted to create a newspaper that you could read in three minutes, 30 minutes or three hours. They made one rule – “There are no rules that you can't break as long as you do it in the interest of the reader.” The results were positive – readership among young people and women under 40 increased year over year for three straight years. |
The term revolution may not sit well with editors for several reasons. There is fear that dramatic change will alienate existing, sometimes older, readers. There is also concern that a new product aimed at a younger audience may be perceived as less serious or less substantial. Those are valid concerns, but our research shows that the SvD approach – innovation made in the interest of the reader – is not alienating or diminishing. It is a signal to new readers that a newspaper has been created for them.
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