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Maybe We Really Should Give Up On Getting The Young to Read Newspapers, and Concentrate on Those Who Appreciate Their Morning or Afternoon Print ReadThere we were together, son and Dad, in the Dallas hotel lobby. On the counter free copies of the Dallas Morning News and USA Today, there for the taking. Dad grabbed both. But for 28-year-old son, this was a “no sale” – he had absolutely no interest in reading either. Not even for free. Television and the Internet, he said, took care of all his information needs.
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This was real culture shock for Dad. For one who had sold cars and other assortments in The Morning News classifieds years ago there was a memory of big fat classified sections. No more. Were those paltry job listings “it”? “How does one find a job in this town,” Dad cried out. Son yelled back the answer to that one real quick, “On the Internet”.
It turns out The Morning News did have a place in son’s life, but it was on the Internet. He used CareerBuilder, and other assorted sites to hunt jobs and access the Morning News job listings, and he said it was far easier doing it on the web than looking in the newspaper. He had absolutely no incentive whatsoever to find a job within the printed classifieds. There was no need to buy that newspaper.
The sad thing about this story is that it is probably true in so many other families, too. Mom and Dad read one or more newspapers a day, and the kids, well, the kids just aren’t reading newspapers. A generalization, yes, but one in which there is a lot of truth.
It makes one think that projects such as the American Press Institute’s “Newspaper Next” project is really too late. The project wants to identify the needs, wants, and frustrations of newspaper readers so they can be better served, but in truth the young horse has already bolted; it’s too late to lock the barn door.
Son isn’t married. Will a newspaper enter his home after wedded bliss? As families grow so supposedly does the need to have a newspaper, not just for the news but to look through the ads. But are newspapers really capable of capturing the attention of the young marrieds? If they don’t then how many generations are left before newspaper reading becomes an extinct family habit?
It makes one remember what California Governor Arnold Swarzenegger told The Los Angeles Times last November that he and his wife “are teaching our children to read the paper in the morning. We started with their favorite section, with Patrick it’s sports. One of the girls looks for the fashion thing, and the other looks for movies. We’re teaching them that when they get up in the morning and come down and make breakfast, read a page. Whatever your favorite page is, we want to create this thing that gets you addicted to it.”
And remember how a couple of years back the Boston Globe bought 49% of Boston Metro for $16.5 million, the thinking being that as the Metro reader grew older he/she would transfer to the Globe. Well, it is only a couple of years, but the Globe’s circulation doesn’t seem yet to have benefitted yet from any such crossover.
And then there was the remake of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It decided it wanted to recapture the young readers and went through a huge 18-month redesign project to do so. It joined in studies with the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, testing various versions of front pages to see which was more coveted by the young – lifestyle stories won. And the decision was made that if you want to attract the young you have to do it not just on the front page, but on every page.
Older readers didn’t necessarily like the changes put in place for the young, but the newspaper was determined to satisfy the needs of young readers. It was understood the young don’t have the patience to read long stories – they prefer to surf smaller stories – and there are now more lists, question and answer columns, new section names, smaller headlines, wider columns, new type font, more coverage of health care, the Internet, young club land, relationships and other subjects appealing to the young plus a one column summary of just about everything in that day’s newspaper.
And the result: In March, 2005 the newspaper’s daily circulation stood at 379,713, but in the September, 2006, ABC it was at 361,172. Sundays were 666,683 in 2005, but in the last ABC that had sunk to 596,333. And as is well known by now McClatchy sold the newspaper last December in which it had invested so much in that redesign for just $530 million plus $160 million in tax credits – a far cry from the $1.2 billion paid to the Cowles family in 1998.
So it doesn’t look like all of that study, time and effort spent in redesign for the young pulled in that crowd, and it tended to upset some older readers who had preferred their newspaper as it had been.
The bottom line: The young are not a newspaper’s primary readers. For the most part they are gone. Concentrate on those who appreciate their daily print read.
Come to think about it, isn’t that exactly how Gannett has described how it sees its newspapers going forward. It makes sense.
from Elaine R. Clisham, American Press Institute
“Regarding your article “Maybe We Really Should Give Up On Getting The Young to Read Newspapers, and Concentrate on Those Who Appreciate Their Morning or Afternoon Print Read,” you mention the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next initiative. We need to correct one inaccuracy you appear to be conveying: yes, the project “wants to identify the needs, wants, and frustrations of newspaper readers so they can be better served;” however, we specifically point out that very often the solutions to address those needs, wants and frustrations will NOT be in the form of a newspaper. One of the main learnings from Newspaper Next is that we in the newspaper industry have to learn to imagine information solutions very differently than just a newspaper if we are to survive, and so in all our workshops and on-site engagements we spend a lot of time working with newspaper executives to coach them to conceive solutions that may have nothing to do with ink on paper. Therefore, to the extent that newspaper organizations are able to shift their thinking, we don’t think we’re late to the party at all. Rather, we hope we’re leading the change in thinking in this industry from being monolithic to being portfolio-based, across all platforms and with products to meet all local consumer and business information needs – whatever forms those might take.”
The full Newspaper Next report is available as a free download at www.newspapernext.org.
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To Dad this was a shocking state of affairs, and yet son didn’t really seem ignorant of the city, state, world around him. Indeed, he seemed to know more about some news events than even old Dad. It’s just that newspapers are not a part of son’s life any more. When he was a teen newspapers didn’t cater to his needs (maybe the sports section did but that was about it!) so he weaned himself away and sought out information mediums that did tell him what he wanted to know about “his” world.