New Newspaper Data from Northwestern

More “good news, bad news” for newspapers from the Readership Institute of Northwestern University:

Readership of the local daily newspaper among the general population is down a little from the last reading in 2006, but that result may be due to seasonal variation. Readership among 18-24-year-olds in the general population continues to slowly decline; but the habit is fairly stable for 45-plus. People who read newspapers say they spend, on average, 27 minutes with them on weekdays, and 57 minutes on Sundays.

There are tons of data and detail in the reports, which can be obtained directly from the Readership Institute site. Here are some of the high-level findings and charts from the study:

• Newspaper Web sites continue to have limited penetration in most communities. As we have mentioned in earlier reports, the potential to develop a strong and differentiated local online brand and to establish usage among groups who don’t read the newspaper much or who prefer to get their news and information online is largely unexploited. Overall, 62% of respondents have never visited their local daily newspaper’s Web site.
• In general, people in smaller markets are less likely to have visited their newspaper’s Web site than those in larger markets. Web site users tend to be younger, more educated, and have higher income.
• The study finds that there is a small, but significant, negative relationship between online usage of the newspaper and readership of the newspaper in print.
• People have a lukewarm response to newspaper Web sites on these qualitative dimensions of engagement – they are not very engaged.
• In addition, people who are heavy consumers of the brand (i.e., read in print and online), rate the newspaper slightly higher than those who only read the print paper.

The time spent with newspaper websites metric is quite impressive and skewed toward the weekday. It suggests a complementary relationship between print and online for some segments of the audience, which tend to be older. The “engagement” assessment — online readers are not very engaged — is troubling for newspapers; so are the numbers of people who’ve never gone to a newspaper site.

A central challenge remains doing a better job monetizing the newspaper sites to make up for lost revenues on the print side — an inherently difficult problem. However, AmericanTowns’ experience suggests an opportunity, among others, that isn’t being fully exploited by newspapers. Perhaps the Yahoo consortium and/or quadrantOne may be helpful in bringing higher CPMs to newspaper sites (beyond the marquee pages).

But the challenge of simply convincing users to visit newspaper sites and exposing them to the content there appears to still be a fundamental issue according to the study (see the first chart above).

___

Related: Positive news on total newspaper readership (reported in MediaPost):

For all the gloom in the newspaper industry, total readership–including Web site visitors–is increasing, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence, which found a 2.1% increase in audience size to 80.6 million between spring 2007 and spring 2008. The survey was performed by MRI for the Newspaper National Network in the top 100 media markets.

Importantly, this figure includes unduplicated online readers, counting each person who reads both newspapers and online just once.

According to the Newspaper Association of America, the total unique audience for newspaper Web sites reached 66.4 million in the first quarter of 2008–12.3% greater than the same period in 2007. Visitors generated 3.1 billion page views in the first quarter, up from 3 billion last year.