Poll Says All That Newspapers Need Do To Stop Readership Slippage Is To Be More Objective, More Relevant, More Compelling, Have Better Design And Better Integrate Online Delivery

And the mood at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) annual convention this week in Cape Town seems to be to accept that inevitability and to work on Plan B -- what can newspapers do to take advantage?

The easy answer is to get involved big-time with their own digital operations and that seems to be understood by most, but what to do with the traditional print product? After all print still provides more than 90% of the advertising revenue, even if reach is enlarging when print and digital readership are added together, so how to keep eyeballs in front of newsprint?

According to that Harris Poll, newspapers can significantly upgrade themselves by providing greater objectivity, more in depth reporting and analysis, and more information that is directly relevant to their readers' lives, and the quality of the writing needs to be more compelling. Now of course that is going to be somewhat difficult to achieve if newspapers continue to decimate their newsrooms as cost-cutting measures, but publishers can’t have it both ways! But that’s not all, the overall product needs to be more visually attractive to the reader, too.

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But there was some good news that publishers must use to good advantage -- their print business has basically very positive brand recognition so they need to do all they can to ensure that positive branding carries over to their web site.

Add it all together and you have the basic winning formula coming out of the Harris Poll conducted last month by Harris Interactive in conjunction with the Innovation International Media Consulting Group and presented Wednesday to WAN and the World Editors Forum

It pretty much supported what Mario Garcia, considered the world’s guru when it comes to newspaper redesign and readership studies, had told publishers and editors a day earlier -- that online really has to become a very important part of their strategy. “Online is where the action is. You have to move your journalistic resources there. Online is where the story begins and the story ends. Print is there to amplify"

And he said that the key to success for both the print and online products is navigation. “The tradition we have seen that you read the newspaper from cover to cover like your grandpa used to is gone, gone forever," he said. Those print and online products that can categorize their news in the most user-friendly manner possible, making it as easy as possible to find exactly what he/she is looking for, are the ones that will win the day.

And he presented an interesting conflict on how exactly print and online can be complimentary. The current view seems to be that online should be used for the short breaking news stories and print can be used for the longer, in-depth coverage. Yet Garcia said recent research has shown, using eye tracking technology, that readers actually spend more time reading online stories, and in more depth, than they do in print.

He pointed out there are two basic kinds of readers each for print and for online. Those who skim through everything just looking for the basics, and those who read at far greater depth. The trick for print and online is to cater for both. For instance, for the skimmers review columns, easily found on, say, page 2, of several items of just one paragraph each covering international, national, regional, local and hyper local may be all some readers really want, whereas others will want far more than the one paragraph. And, all readers need to be able to find what they want to find as easily as possible.

That last item brings up a memory from which publishers could really learn. Many years ago the London Evening Standard always printed the television listings on the top half of page two, with a very expensive display ad taking the bottom half. Grab the newspaper on the way home, you want to know what’s on the tellie tonight and you could always go to page two and there it was. No looking in indexes or the like – it was always there on page 2. Easy. And then the Standard changed editors and page 2 was given over to news and expanded television listings got buried deep inside. Different pages every day, difficult to find. A real aggravation.

Another navigation example, also from the Standard. Many years ago it started printing its financial section on the Financial Times’ pink colored paper. No question a bit of a brand rip-off, but it was an easy, convenient way to find the financial news among the 80 pages or so of the tabloid package.

And those two examples really point the way for what newspaper design experts need to tackle today – not only eradicating aggravations but also making it very simple to spot what one does want amid all of that verbiage.

Another big problem facing newspapers, as Garcia also pointed out, is that by the time the paper gets delivered the news is already “old”. Today people get alerts on their mobile phones or email alerts on the Internet for those items they have already indicated are of most interest, it doesn’t take long for the breaking story to follow and yet many hours later that same news agency story appears in the newspaper. What’s the point? Newspapers, he said, are going to have to concentrate on the future – forward-looking stories – rather than depend on telling readers what has already happened.

Harris conducted its poll online among 8,749 adults in seven countries – the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Australia. Respondents told their current sources of news and information, and what changes they see five years into the future. They were also asked to assess the credibility of newspapers today, and their role, and that of their online sites, today and in the future.

While television news programs on traditional and cable networks are the primary information providers today in all the regions polled, a sharp increase in the role of online news information is predicted for five years down the road, largely at the expense of television, with smaller inroads into the market for newspapers.

Despite the likely decline in print circulation, newspaper publishers should see a challenge and an opportunity in extending their brands online, said Douglas S. Griffen, an Innovation and Harris International Consultant, and the Director of Strategy at the Advanced Strategy Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, who presented the survey results.

The poll found television news (both network and cable) to be the primary source of information today for between 35% and 39% of adults in six countries, dropping to 29% in Spain, where it was close to the number who rely on newspapers, 28%. In the other six countries, reliance on newspapers ranged from 23% in the UK, US and Australia, to a low of 16% in France, 21% in Italy, and 22% in Germany.

Looking five years down the road, all countries indicated greater use of online news and information with significant parallel losses for television network news, with modest increases for cable news, and newspapers down from moderately to significantly. Radio remains relevant, with moderate decreases.

Newspaper credibility gets reasonably high marks, 50 or higher on a scale of 1 to 100, with some significant geographic differences, from a low of 50 in Great Britain to a high of 67 in Germany.

At the same time the poll found that a high number of respondents (over 75% of adults in each country) consider newspapers and their associated websites extremely important because of their role as community watchdogs, in clarifying important global issues, and providing relevant information that is interesting to know and useful in daily life. “While readers don't expect newspapers to change the world, they count on them to help see and understand the world better,” Griffen said.

Asked why people do not read newspapers, more than half of poll respondents in six of the countries pointed to lack of time (in Spain this dropped to 44 percent). At least 40% of adults in all seven countries said easier access to news online was a reason. Other reasons included newspapers need to eliminate bias, improve writing, increase relevance to readers' daily lives, improve visual content and presentation, and help connect readers to their communities.

US respondents were asked about credibility and respondents said the credibility of print can be extended to their websites, but not enough effort goes into promoting the connection between newspapers and their online products.