A decade of declining readership figures has newspaper executives across the nation wondering how to engage and win back subscribers.
Millions of dollars have been poured into national readership studies of habits tracking everything from how often and in what direction your eyeballs move as they scan a page to your attitudes about the content of your local newspaper and your feelings about whether opinions are creeping into the news stories.
Perhaps the most surprising information discovered in these kinds of studies is the fact that most daily subscribers to newspapers feel a certain sense of ownership about the paper they read. Some of this sense might come from the local columnists that individual papers run — in the case of The Salt Lake Tribune, writers like Robert Kirby (who reports from the first circle of Hell), Holly Mullen (who reports from here and there around the Salt Lake Valley), Tom Wharton (who reports from places in Utah so small they sometimes do not have proper names) and Paul Rolly and JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells (who report on myriad topics, all of which annoy the oh-my-heck out of local politicians).
Some of the sense of ownership might come from the attitudes of some longtime Utah residents that their ancestors came here with or shortly after the pioneers and the sense of history this brings. Some of it may come from the fact that a daily newspaper tends to be a snapshot of the 24-hour period of the area in which it is produced.
Whatever the origin, that sense of ownership in the local newspaper exists in every metropolitan area and colors the way people view what appears in the newspaper. I did not need national surveys to bring home this point. I am on the receiving end of that sense of ownership every time The Tribune runs a story that enrages certain groups of individuals.
The investment of time and effort that readers put into their daily newspapers is worthy of respect. Carving time out of busy days to struggle with international, national, state and local news means some other activity has to be sacrificed in the name of keeping current.
In homage to that sacrifice, I propose a small experiment. For those of you who exhibit such feelings of ownership in what appears in your Salt Lake Tribune, this will give you a chance to play editor. Over the next week, please save the front page of your Tribune and send me a note or an e-mail with the date of the pages, the stories you felt belonged on the front page and the stories inside the A section that you felt should have been on the front page.
Make no mistake, although this exercise does mimic the decisions that are made on a daily basis by editors at The Tribune, those editors are not giving up their positions of leadership. I am curious about what you would do on a daily basis if you were the editors. I want to know not only what stories you would eliminate and what stories you would substitute for them, but also why you made those decisions.
Some studies indicate that editors are not close enough to understanding how subscribers use newspapers and because of this distance, they fail to fulfill the readers’ needs. The traditional news values — including timeliness, proximity, celebrity, unusual events, impact and conflict — have been debated in newsrooms and university classes across the country. Some people have tried to substitute alternate news values to redesign how publications are planned.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow (who shuffled off this mortal coil in 1970) left behind a theory of human behavior based on his hierarchy of need that has been used to design the content of numerous consumer publications, including the version of the National Enquirer that drew its biggest circulation in the late 1980s. Maslow maintained that humans first were concerned with physiological needs (food, water and other life requirements), then with safety needs (structure, safety, security), then love and belonging needs (friends and family), then the esteem needs (respect from others and self-respect) and finally a level of “self-actualization” (the need to grow and excel in your life).
Let’s call this an experiment in information-gathering. I will pass along to editors the information that I gather — and
I will come up with some sort of little prize for the best three entries that I get. This is an informational exercise, so don’t expect your ideas to drive the Tribune’s next issue.
The loser of this exercise should beware; I might insist on having lunch with that person. —–
The Reader Advocate’s phone number is (801) 257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.
This Week’s Stats
23 Number of readers who believe The Tribune has “too many ads”
172 Number of readers who want to keep the daily bridge column
12 Number of readers who want to keep comic strips “Mary Worth,” “Judge Parker”
25 Number of readers who think The Tribune crossword is “perfect”
