There’s No question That The Young Are Interested In News So It’s The Primary Job for Newspaper Publishers Is To Ensure Their News Is Available On All The Right Platforms

Philip M. Stone December 14, 2007

Many newspapers have given up on trying to regain their young readers who have drifted away to other platforms, but that’s a big mistake -- publishers should be ensuring that whatever platforms the young are looking at then that is where the newspaper should be, too.

That  point was made loud and clear in a recent presentation by Robert W. Deckherd, Belo’s chairman and CEO, that was buried at the end of his presentation to shareholders and analysts at the UBS Media Week meeting in New York.  In talking about what a newspaper does bests he said that no other news entity can cover its local community as can a newspaper. Nobody has as many journalists who can cover so much that is going on.

So the problem for newspapers today that are losing readers to the Internet and elsewhere is not that the newspaper doesn’t have the news those people want, but rather it’s that those readers just prefer platforms other than newspaper for daily news fixes. It doesn’t take rocket science, therefore, to figure out that if those readers have gone elsewhere, then the newspaper should be doing exactly the same – making sure that its news content is available  on whatever platform those readers desire.

As Deckerd put it, ““Our challenge is that we are monetizing the right demographic audience through the right platforms, wherever, however they want it.” So if the young want their high school sports results on their mobile phone, there should be the newspaper providing that information.

A year ago at the same Media Week meeting Sue-Clark Johnson, president of Gannett’s newspaper division, explained that Gannett newspapers “are going to be positioned more in the direction to those more comfortable reading print. Our Information Centers enable us to connect to the community, engage readers and provide a more customer-centric approach for our advertisers.”

She said that as part of the Information Center routines now in effect at all Gannett daily newspapers, breaking news will appear first on web sites and digital services and less on newspapers. The more successful the web and digital sites then the smaller the print newspaper will become and newspapers will be targeted at a 45-year-old-plus audience that is typically middle and upper-income with post-high school education.

But that doesn’t mean that Gannett is not going to produce news that the young want to read or see. It basically accepts that print newspaper readership by the young will continue to decline but the newspaper should not just throw up its hands and say, “That’s them gone”, rather where the young go so should the newspaper.

One successful Belo example of how to attract the young is its HS Game Time Site in Dallas covering high school sports that has proven a huge success in drawing in the young by using video and news from both the Belo’s newspaper and television station in the market.  An agreement is being drawn up so that when the newspaper and television divisions become separate companies soon in the New Year that they will continue to contribute and run the site.

Was it that long ago when daily readership figures for the 18 – 30 age group was more than 50%? According to a report issued in June by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, only 16% of that age group read a newspaper daily today. And 9 percent of teenagers said that they did not read a newspaper at all.

But that does not translate into only 16% are interested in news. More than 50% of them still are interested in daily news but the newspaper is not where they go – television is still the main news source followed by the Internet and other digital platforms. Practically all newspapers now have their web sites, although an alarming number really haven’t got into video in a big way which is a big mistake. Quoting Deckherd again he said that in the first nine months of 2006, there were 145,000 video streaming requests on his company’s newspaper web sites and yet in the first nine months of 2007 that number reached 2.2 million. 

Jupiter Media, a media resource company, says 33% of online young adults use the Internet as their primary news source and that number is quickly on the increase. And as that Dallas high school sports site proves, if you provide it, they will come.

If you think about it, it should really not be much of a surprise that young people and, say, their parents use different platforms for their news. Think about television use in the home. How long has it been since Mum and Dad and teenage son and daughter actually sat down to watch an evening’s television together without argument on what to watch? The fact is that viewing habits are different for the young and not so young, so why not differences on how they like to obtain their news? Sure, there is some crossover, but not everything suits everybody.  

What newspapers should be doing is coming up with new marketing ideas that allows their readers to see news when and how they wish. Take the announcement Wednesday by Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading morning newspaper, that it is making available via its web site a special Nokia mobile phone (note not a Swedish Sony-Ericsson) that has a special button that when pressed takes the user directly to the newspaper’s mobile web site.

Thorbjoern Larsson, the editor-in-chief and publisher, summed it up simply, “This is yet another way of distributing the news.”

The newspaper says the phone is a world first, designed so people can follow the news of the day even if they’re not at home or in the office. Accessing the web site costs a set 199 kroner (€21, $31) a month, (the phone itself is free on a 12-month contract but if bought commercially would cost around 1200 kroner (€126, $185)) but it will only be available to those who subscribe to the print edition. Larsson said that on the first day of launch the newspaper’s switchboard couldn’t handle all the calls asking more details.

And isn’t creating that type of marketing excitement what the newspaper business should be all about these days?

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