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When it comes to luring more young readers back to daily newspaper reading, the Readership Institute of Northwestern University in Chicago has good news and bad news.
First, the good news: Newspapers can be reinvented to make them more attractive to people under age 30.
Now, the bad news: It won't be easy.
Institute researchers based their conclusions on six years of investigation into newspaper readers' habits and motivations. In the Front Page Study — completed in May 2005, researchers teamed up with editors and reporters at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis to develop two different versions of the front page and an inside page for a typical news day, then tested the reactions of the target audience — self-supporting, childless under-30s with a range of occupations.
The results strongly indicated that the most effective way to reach those readers was through a reader-centered approach to newspaper editing and design, which the Institute calls “editing for experience.” The approach begins with “choosing the effects you want to create in your audience, then picking and crafting content to get those results.”
Readers liked the lively “Experience” version of the Star Tribune front page. (Courtesy Minneapolis Star Tribune)
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Editors were guided by three experiential goals identified by the Readership Institute as feelings, emotions and motivations that cause people to read daily newspapers more: “gives me something to talk about,” “looks out for my interests” and “turned on by surprise and humor.”
The 140 targeted readers looked at three page versions: the Original Paper that was actually published; the Improved Paper, which included the same stories recrafted to change emphasis, play and approach to enhance the three chosen experiences; and the Experience Paper, in which the three experiences drove both story choice and presentation.
For example, the Experience Paper jettisoned a lead story about a woman who planned to walk every street of Minneapolis as holding little interest for young readers. The replacement, a centerpiece about legalizing Texas Hold 'Em poker, was cast in an engaging pro-con debate format and included information about how to play and where to practice online.
A story about legislation requiring police to collect DNA from any Minnesotan arrested on a felony was reshaped to speak directly to the reader. The original headline, “Broader DNA Collection Law Proposed,” became “License, Registration and Saliva please. . . .” The original third-person, institutional account was edited to offer many entry points, to break out useful information in marginalia and boxes and to point readers to a debate in the next day's paper. A new lead, or opening paragraph, addressed readers' interests directly: “If you're ever arrested for a felony in Minnesota, you may soon be asked to open wide and give a sample of saliva along with your fingerprint.”
Respondents preferred the Experience Paper over the other two by a ratio of roughly 3-to-1, scoring it much higher on such criteria as: more likely to catch your attention, more visually appealing, more likely to get you to read, more memorable, easier to get information, would cause you to mention when talking with friends, story selection, looks out for your interests and makes the news more interesting.
“What we heard from these young adult Minnesotans is typical of what we hear from young Americans everywhere,” the study overview reported. “Newspapers are OK, but they don't compel and engage.”
But making them more compelling, while doable, will require altering long-entrenched editorial practices. “Newspapers tend to talk about topics, keeping a distance between themselves, the topic and the reader,” noted team leader Nancy Barnes, assistant managing editor at the Star Tribune. “In this experiment we actively sought to talk to readers directly, and engage them every step along the way. That makes the newspaper seem more personal. It goes against our natural instinct, however.”
“Experiences are a way of converting traditional news judgment from editors' definitions (what's most interesting, what's most important, what you just can't believe happened) to readers' definitions of how they react (what makes readers feel informed, what gives them something to talk about, what tells them the paper is looking out for their interests),” said Star Tribune Editor Anders Gyllenhaal.
The young readers' clear preference for the Experience Paper over the Improved Paper supported researchers' contention that reversing the decline in daily newspaper readership will require an editorial revolution within the dailies' hard-news core, not just stylistic changes around the edges.
The overall lesson was “Yes, you can do that,” said Mary Nesbitt, managing director of the Readership Institute. But, she continued, “The degree of change you need to make is substantial. It's not just a matter of redesigning the look of the front page. It is that, but it is a lot more than that. You have to consider, given your target audience, how are you defining news in the first place. Where are you going to look for news? What approach or angle do you take with the story? And then how do you present it effectively?”
— Rachel S. Cox
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