by Clyde H. Bentley, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Missouri School of Journalism, 2009-2010 Donald W. Reynolds Fellow

Dear NNA friends:

Through our partnership with the Missouri School of Journalism and its Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, NNA now provides regular updates on current journalism and media research. Associate Professor Clyde Bentley, an experienced community newspaper executive and educator, will highlight and analyze the latest research from around the country that may have an impact on your operations.

Well read

So which publisher out there sent an early letter to Santa? The industry is a long way from being out of the woods, but it got a couple of early presents from researchers to partially balance the coal in its stocking.

The 74 percent solution

For a dead medium, the newspaper certainly gets around. In fact, three-quarters (OK, just 74 percent) of American adults read a newspaper at least once a week according to Scarborough Research. Mind you, that's a newspaper either in print or online. It's both a comforting statistic and a good indication that the hybrid definition of "newspaper" offers a more accurate picture of the institution that fields an army of reporters, keeps an eye on governments big and small, and keeps it coming day after day.

Deeper in Scarborough's report are a few good news/bad news statistics to ponder. In the average week, newspapers (print or online) are read by 79 percent of white collar workers, 82 percent of adults with incomes of $100,000 or more and 84 percent of college graduates. That's an upscale niche advertisers like, but it makes you wonder if part of our readership problem is spelled "elitism." For instance, only 27 percent of American adults have a bachelor's degree or higher. The college grad level grows to 35 percent if you add two-year associates degrees, but the remaining 65 percent of our potential audience is still too big to ignore.

A low wall

Cynics be damned, consumers around the world are willing to pay for news online. A study by Boston Consulting Group indicates the notorious "pay wall" isn't much of a barrier, as consumers around the world are willing to pay amounts to access online news. That said, in the U.S. the wall still needs to be low. Americans were willing to cough up us $3 a month for online news, while Italians would spend $7.

The fact that the American online news budget is low was offset in the study by the market share that newspapers earned. The BCG researchers found people would more likely pay for information on newspaper websites than from any other online source. The researchers also found a particularly strong (73 percent) willingness to pay for the local news at which papers excel. The kicker is that they will only pay if the information is unique (you can't Google it and get 50 hits), it must be timely (61 percent said they'd pay for news alerts), and it must be conveniently accessible on whatever device the consumer chooses. The survey polled 5,083 people in nine countries.

BCG's researchers strongly recommended than newspapers experiment with paid online content, but warned it will "take trial and error to find out what works."

By another measure

Editor and Publisher started using a new yardstick to measure effectiveness in its monthly reports on top news sites -- "Average number of sessions per user." It provides a look at reader loyalty by tracking how often a person returns to the site. If the metric is accurate, it says something very profound about metropolitan newspapers. The highest-rated newspaper on the list was the New York Times, with just under four visits per month. That means Web users have turned America's most prestigious daily into a weekly. Both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal attracted less frequency: 3.35 and 2.81. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had the most loyal readers with an average of 5.7 sessions per month (once every 5 1/2 days).

By comparison to the non-newspaper world, Yahoo News drew 5.76 visits per month, AOL had 7.07 and CNN had 7.07. NPR counts on listener loyalty for survival, but drew only 2.32 sessions per month. That makes it All Things Considered Every Two Weeks.

The shock to me wasn't the low ratings for the Times or the Post. I am more disturbed by how infrequently people visit any news site. Nielsen (E&P's parent) reported that the average American made 53 Internet visits/sessions in October to an average 87 domains. If news sites are not even attracting daily visits, what does that say about our emphasis on 24/7 immediacy?

They didn't click

The rest of the E&P report puts the development of a new way of measuring use into perspective, The old standard measure -- unique visitors -- counts any computer that has not been on the target site in the past 30 minutes. In raw numbers, the New York Times pulled in a huge crowd -- 17.4 million visitors. That sounds impressive to advertiser and layman alike, but dividing it by the new metric indicates a "churn" of about 4 million readers per week (and it was down 15 percent from last year). Still, there were interesting numbers in E&P's list of the top 30 newspaper sites. Among them was that the year-to-year drop in unique visits to Newsday was only 25 percent even after it put most of its content behind a pay wall. The free online Washington Post by comparison, was down 28 percent and the Daily News was down a whopping 40 percent.

Listen to Mom

A Scarborough/Arbitron report on working moms made headlines in the trade press for pointing out that they are a huge mobile marketing target. But more of interest to the newsroom is the breakdown of their media preferences.

Data drawn from a huge Scarborough survey showed that the 21.6 million U.S. mothers who are employed full time are tech-savvy and hungry for the right kind of news. They are 27 percent more likely than anyone else to read a newspaper online. And when they get there, they are 25 percent more likely to read local news and community events. Unlike the stay-at-home "mommy bloggers," working moms find blogs somewhat of a turnoff. And sports scores -- well, let's not go there.

Working moms have impact far beyond their 9 percent chunk of the population. Despite their hectic schedules, they tend to make buying decisions for the whole family. They soak up any information that can help them feed, clothe and shelter their family and love anything that can save them time and money doing it. The study also found another factor that newspapers can help by providing appropriate content -- working moms treasure energetic "me time" to wind down. They have high interest in participative sports, fitness and outdoor activities.

A dirty online story

Charles Klotzer of the St. Louis Journalism Review suggested I take a look at a report that print publications are softer on the environment than online publications. UK magazine company Reed Elsevier decided to hire a consultant to calculate the "carbon footprint" of both the print and the online operations of its titles, "Fuel." Surprise! Online lost.

Marcia Balisciano, Reed Elsevier's director of corporate responsibility, wrote about the experiment in The Guardian recently. Best Foot Forward, an environmental consulting firm, took the normal impacts of publication (printing, offices, etc.) and added in transportation and the use of energy by the end users to make the call.

I'm rather suspicious of this type of commissioned report, but Best Foot Forward checked out as a legitimate firm. I was also able to find a longer study in Sweden that compared print newspapers, Web editions and e-readers. In that study, both the Web edition and the e-reader were cleaner if the readers kept their daily dose of the news to 10 minutes. If they lingered on the page for 30 minutes, the environmental difference between print and Web was negligible because online readers used more coal-generated electricity to keep warm and see the fine print.

The other doomsday

Sorry, you'll still have to do your budget for 2012. Despite the movie hype and the cable TV specials, the world won't end just because the Mayan calendar expires. At least that's the learned opinion of NASA's experts, who posted a special truth-in-hysteria page. No word from the space guys on how newspapers will fare, however.