First Draft by Tim Porter

Tim: could you do something for me? Like, maybe ponder the possibility that reading for entertainment is simply going out of style and perhaps *that* is the reason why papers' circulations keep falling? I mean, I'm with you on papers being largely clueless but some part of me still suspects that clueful papers would be in the same boat. Heck, I read in the New Yorker today that only one out of seven Americans will *ever* enter a bookstore. Would better stories and smarter management really save us, or just stave off the inevitable?

Tom, my gut tells me you're right about the non-reading public, athough this booksellers' trade group report suggests books seem to be holding their own, but I'm no expert in that area (and, for that matter, neither am I in newspaper readership).

And, I confess to perhaps ringing the same bell too many times. Your comments made me think that maybe I'm trying to make one solution fit a problem whose components come in many different configurations. That I need to think about more.

However, I do believe, even given declining literacy -- or at least accelerating visual literacy at the expense of print -- that newspapers can stanch the readership loss by embracing the principles set out by the Readership Institute. Here they are, taken from the RI's web site:

Service
* Push service into the "excellence zone"

Editorial & Advertising Content
* Improve high-potential content areas
* Focus on a particular type of local news
* Make the newspaper easier to read & more navigable
* Improve advertising content
* Promote content more effectively in the newspaper

Brand
* Build a positive brand that's relevant to readers

Organizational Culture
* Develop an adaptive, constructive culture that is attuned to readers

These are actionable goals that do not require additional capital or operational investment. They do, howeverk, require an attitude change.

I have been interviewing executives from large companies and law firms about organizational culture and staff training as they relate to their companies' ability to adapt and succeed in competitive environments. To a person, they stress the importance of the connection between customer (in our case, the reader), culture and staff. This connection is missing not only in most newsrooms, but in the business-side operations of most newspaper companies as well.

I know doing good, or better, journalism is not enough to reverse readership trends. But it is certainly a start and a key ingredient to any remedy. As is a dry newspaper that arrives on my doorstep before I leave for the office, flexible formatting for different audiences, acceptance by the newsroom that many readers prefer data over narrative, and more and more and more.

As you said, the inevitable may be that newspapers (and when I use that term I mean print and electronic) fade into irrelevance. I hope not. But if they do, I don't want the quality or the journalism or the rigidity of the journalists to be the reason.

I think we build an incredibly rich product every day but never tell anybody about it -- remember, our public is the same one that sees no problem with Arnie as gov; they are not all that sophisticated about the deeper issues of journalism. Buying the paper should be second nature to people like asking for "Coke..." after all it's really cheap in light of how much stuff is in it. But we do nothing to build the brand ... we spend millions on editorial product and expect it to sell itself. And it does to a remarkable degree considering how little we promote it. I think the greatest resistance is from the business side and it stems from a reluctance to give money to perceived competitors. The history of advertising is replete with stories of people buying things they don't need, how hard could be to sell them something that is quite useful?

Let me elaborate a bit on the need for promotion and marketing. Not only do we need to do more promotion and marketing of newspapers, what we DO do has got to be better. Much better. I spent about seven years in radio in small and medium-sized markets (verging on large), and I'm exaggerating only slightly when I say that the most podunk 1,000-watt AM radio station in America might well be promoting itself better than ANY American daily newspaper.

And THAT goes back to knowing your customers/readers.

I think a cheap but effective way of marketing newspapers to young and engaged readers would be for stodgy, mired-in-the-20th-century editors to drop their opposition to reporters' personal blogs. Here's an idea: let reporters who have blogs include the URL in their taglines, where most papers now print email addresses and phone numbers of an article's author. Then readers can decide for themselves whether a writer's blog has influenced how they cover the issues. Papers should encourage reporters to link the paper's web site on their blogs, and link to their own articles. That will bring a host of new readers to the paper. And it will show that the paper embraces new technology, rather than runs from it.