Topics that are Read

Successfully reaching readers requires meeting those
readers' needs, rather than looking for gimmicks.

A passage from the new Media General corporate plan, entitled, "Media General in Migration," emphasizes the point that only the strong will survive in the newspaper industry - and in business in general - in this new marketplace. The plan quotes a Michael Crichton novel, "The Lost World," in which Crichton explores the reasons why dinosaurs are extinct. One of his characters, while talking about other species, could have been talking about newspapers:

"Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call the edge of chaos. This is a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and the new are constantly at war. Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter - if a living system drifts too close to the edge, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution. But if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can systems flourish. And, by implications, extinction is the inevitable result of one or the other strategy - too much change or too little."

I have looked at a number of newspapers. Their improvements have been grounded in research with readers and non-readers. In each, the goal has been to add reader value, to help the newspaper become reader-driven.

When readers glance at a newspaper, the eye looks for value - even with a quick glance. Consider how much time we spend with media. These estimates are about a year old, and were compiled by Veronis Suhler & Associates:

• The average American spends 1,560 hours per year watching TV - a little more than four hours a day.
• The average American spends 169 hours per year reading a newspaper - less than half an hour a day.

So the typical American devotes nearly nine times as much time to watching television as reading a daily newspaper. Not to mention all the other activities represented as "media" in these estimates. How can a newspaper flourish with all this competition?

In our work with newspapers, we use a decision model that measures public interest in a variety of topics, and then the kind of job the client newspaper does in covering each topic. The results can be correlated in a grid like the one illustrating this article.

The place to focus is the lower right quadrant. These are topics that have high interest, but the newspaper's performance is rated below average. We call these "opportunity topics."

Opportunity topics vary somewhat from one market to another, but we see the following topics surface repeatedly from one study to another:

• Local community news (especially for large newspapers)
• Health, fitness, medicine, nutrition
• Education and schools
• The environment
• Consumer tips (especially for women)
• Parenting, children, and families
• Science, technology, and computers

The point is that if a newspaper is going to concentrate resources on improvements to the core product or product extensions, these topics offer excellent opportunities to attract public attention and readership.