Just when newspapers are talking local, here’s a research study which should make newspapers think again – 67 per cent of the respondents of the study never visited their local daily newspaper’s website in 2006. The number is down from 70 per cent in 2003, but up 3 percentage points from 2005.
It is only for a small but growing number of people, that local newspapers are being replaced by their websites. Of those who use the local newspaper’s website, 27 per cent report they use it instead of the newspaper itself – up from 22 per cent in 2003 and about the same as 2005 (26 per cent).
These findings are from the latest of an annual series of national readership studies that the Readership Institute conducts in 100 newspaper markets in the US. More than 3,000 randomly-selected adults were surveyed in September-October of 2006.
The newspapers are those that participated in the institute’s Impact Study of Readership in 2000 and have been studied in various ways in the intervening years. They represent a profile of the US daily newspaper population (circulation greater than 10,000) with proportionate representation of small, mid-size and large markets, and their readership.
The Readership Institute is a division of the Media Management Centre at Northwestern University, US. It focuses on actionable research, field-testing of readership-building ideas and measurement of their success, and education and training for the newspaper industry on readership-building best practices.
The survey also found that those who do access the newspaper’s website tend to be younger, more educated, and have a higher income than those who do not. Men and women access the sites to the same extent, but men report more frequent usage.
Local daily newspapers with higher circulation have better penetration in their markets. Websites of newspapers with 100-200,000 or over 200,000 circulation enjoy more access in their market than smaller newspapers. For example, 59 per cent of respondents in markets with newspapers of 100-200,000 circulation said they never accessed the newspaper’s website, compared to 67-71 per cent of respondents in markets with smaller newspapers. Similarly, 12 per cent of respondents reported they visited the websites of newspapers with 100-200,000 circulation within the last seven days, compared to much smaller numbers for papers of other sizes.
Among those who read the print newspaper, the survey found a pattern of greater readership for those who read the print paper only, compared to those who read the print and online products. This indicates that online readership may be substituting for some readership of the print product, the authors noted.
In terms of site usage behaviour, the study found that 87.48 per cent wanted to read a story, while 87.02 per cent wanted to search the site for information, 64.90 per cent clicked on related links, 61.38 per cent looked at photos or graphics, and 60.36 per cent browsed the classified ads.
The authors, however, cautioned newspapers about interpreting users’ behaviour on these sites – “some of the least common online behaviours on newspaper websites are contributing content, communicating with reporters and bloggers, and requesting news alerts sent to mobile devices and RSS feeds. This may be more an indication of what sites offer than what users want.”
The study combined all 38 items of online news behaviour to form an “online sophistication” index, which measures how many of the possible online news behaviours the respondent ever performed on the website (i.e., the scale adds up the number of items for which the respondent answered “yes”).
On average, respondents’ online sophistication was quite limited in terms of how much they do on newspapers’ websites. For those who have accessed the newspaper’s website within the last 30 days, the average “online sophistication” score was 10.7 on a scale of 0 to 38. This meant that the average person utilised less than a third of 38 things it was possible, in theory, to do on a newspaper’s website.
While users of larger papers were a bit more sophisticated, there were no statistically significant differences in online sophistication between Web users of different size newspapers.
