23 Apr 08 Scarborough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report 2008

Consumer shopping research firm Scarborough Research, a Nielsen Media affiliate, has released its 2008 Newspaper Audience Ratings Report. The SNARR, besides just being a fun word to say, can be a useful and quick measure for newspapers, but it is not a perfect measure.

CLICK HERE to read the report. (PDF)

What does all of this mean?

The numbers are basically a measure of your organization’s market penetration, meaning what percentage of the audience in a specific ‘Designated Market Area’ you have. In this case, the DMA is a specific grouping of counties that is in the newspaper’s coverage area.

This is an OK measure, but I take issue with their methodology. This is how they describe how they came up with these numbers:

The Scarborough study is based on a random sample of adults (ages 18+). Scarborough Research employs a two-phase methodology to collect data: a randomly dialed telephone interview followed by a written, self-administered consumer questionnaire and television diary. The newspaper audience information and websites visited are captured during the telephone interview. A Media Rating Council (MRC) accredited media and marketing service, our newspaper data meets the highest data quality standards.

Now, knowing what I know about polling and human behavior, I think these numbers might be slightly inaccurate. Even if it is random and even if people are given anonymity, they will lie. People are afraid to admit they don’t read the paper so they fudge the results. This happens in politics with voter turnout surveys and the like. The numbers never measure up to the reality because people lie. They don’t want to appear to be Luddites or a philistine, even if no one is actually watching.

If anything, this study should have some margin of error but I could find none listed. Still, these numbers could serve to give the advertising department more leverage to bargain with advertisers and give an indication to the newsroom of where they may need to focus their attention.

What does this mean for online?

I also feel that this holds a little less weight for online. Despite the low percentage of market penetration for most news Web sites, I think that is indicative of global reach and more ‘World is Flat’ mentality of news Web sites.

Sure a lot of traffic comes from the local market but more often Web traffic comes from outside links and search engine results. These readers, drive-by surfers, have little brand loyalty. The questions is: How can newspaper Web sites take advantage of this and quantify it to advertisers and also appropriate the behavior to how they run their sites?

Paul Gillin of Newspaper Death Watch recently wrote about what he called the ‘Content-driven Reader‘ and how it is changing the landscape of journalism and online journalism. A good read. Be sure to also follow the links to both Jarvis’ post and Alan D. Mutter’s post on the same topic.

The key word here: Content.

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Tags: journalism, news business, numbers, ratings