by Anna Sandelli

Reading a newspaper from cover to cover is, for many Americans, less a part of daily life than a routine from a bygone era – an observation that has made some fear that continued declines in readership and sales could cause the newspaper industry’s demise. For other industry leaders and participants, such trends offer motivation to work to prevent this outcome.

One extensive effort to help the industry emerged in September 2005, when the American Press Institute joined with consulting firm Innosight LLC to launch the year-long “Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project,” in which it invested $2 million.

Under the leadership of project managing director Stephen Gray, Innosight managing director Scott Anthony, Innosight founder and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and a 25-member task force, the project strove to develop, test and share business strategies that could reverse declines in newspaper sales and readership.

However, as its final report “Blueprint for Transformation” noted, reversing these trends first means understanding
why fewer readers and advertisers seemed interested in newspapers.

By conducting interviews and studying thousands of reports and stories, the Newspaper Next team found that decreased interest seemed to be the result of an enormous change in how people interact with and obtain information.

“The change is advancing quickly toward a new reality in which people can get any information, any time and any place, and publish their own content at will,” a change with a social impact “likely to rival the advent of movable type and mass literacy,” the report said.

Newspapers have gone from having an almost total monopoly on information to being one of a nearly infinite number of sources, the report also noted. New sources, which may be cheaper, quicker to access or more personalized than newspapers often quickly supersede them.

School Associate Professor Deb Aikat, who attended a presentation of the Newspaper Next findings that the school co-sponsored at the Feb. 22 North Carolina Press Association’s Winter Institute in Raleigh, thinks that increasingly hectic lives make new options attractive.

“Urban Americans are reading less, period,” Aikat said, noting that newspapers often lie on driveways all day long because people have no time to read them.

In the mornings, parents are often too busy getting themselves to work or their children to school to read a paper, he said. If they read it at night, it has become a stale product, he said.

When he compares the United States to his native India, where he worked with the media for 15 years, Aikat again sees this link between decreased free time and decreased reading. Newspaper circulation in India is on the rise today, he said. However, most people in India start their work day at 10 a.m., which gives them an extra hour or two to read papers in the mornings.

Because few can slow down their lives, Americans have instead changed their media behavior, Aikat said.

 “We are a nation of skimmers,” he said. “We get news in small snippets.”

To respond to changes in Americans’ behaviors and needs, the newspaper industry also has to change, the Newspaper Next team noted in its final report.

The 95-page report discusses steps needed to achieve change and the stories of newspaper organizations that undertook demonstration projects beginning in February 2006.

Among the strategies it highlights is a shift from a “monolithic product,” or the familiar daily or weekly newspaper, to a portfolio of products that includes special sections or interactive online content.

The Dallas Morning News, one of seven papers chosen for a demonstration project, put this strategy into practice with its plans for a GuideFamily.com Web site.

The team working on this project found that less than 15 percent of 700,000 mothers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area relied on their daily paper. Instead, many used the Internet to find information. Using this knowledge, the team decided to create a site to reach busy moms.

Links to services like kid-friendly restaurants and summer camps were part of the proposed site, along with real moms’ reviews of products. Such a design not only met the goal of developing a portfolio of products, it also was a step toward another of Newspaper Next’s aims: encouraging newspaper companies to see people not as passive readers but as active participants.

The Internet is not the only venue on which the Newspaper Next method focuses. It also suggests that news organizations maximize their core business model, which includes the tried and true print edition. In its demonstration project, The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, Calif., worked on this goal by asking employees to reveal how much of the paper they read regularly. Only 6 percent said they continued reading articles that jumped from the first page and even fewer followed jumps from other pages, a finding that encouraged a move to shorter articles.

While the magnitude of Newspaper Next’s strategies may leave some news organizations wondering how they can even start to change, the American Press Institute offers tools to help.

Steve Buttry, the institute’s director of tailored programs, who gave a presentation at the Feb. 22 seminar and spoke with school faculty in Carroll Hall on Feb. 23, said that the institute offers seminars, workshops and even long-term consulting to companies who want to apply Newspaper Next ideas to their organizations. A do-it-yourself kit and “Webinars” that companies could share with employees who cannot attend seminars are other ideas in the works, he added.

Buttry also said that although he has heard mostly enthusiastic responses to his presentations, he understands that not everyone may be thrilled about Newspaper Next’s ideas.

“The newspaper industry is deeply resistant to change and I’m sure will resist some of the things we are advocating,” he said. “However, the widespread cuts, the declining circulations and now declining newspaper values, the decline and demise of Knight Ridder, followed by the upheaval at Tribune, have the industry ready to listen to people with thoughtful answers.”

Buttry also noted that finding new ways to reach audiences, as Newspaper Next proposes, does not mean sacrificing quality journalism to please readers. Instead, building an audience goes hand-in-hand with providing quality material.

“You aren’t informing [readers] with your reporting if they aren’t reading your product,” he said. “You can’t generate the revenue that supports quality public service journalism if you don’t build an audience for your advertisers.”

School Dean Jean Folkerts, who attended part of the Feb. 22 seminar, said that this need to set a stage for audiences is something she has seen in her own experiences.

“I do think that editors and writers have to think about the audiences they write for,” she said. “We can’t just write for some hypothetical person out there. When I was in journalism school as an undergraduate, professors told us to write for people with a fifth-grade education. I think that kind of thinking perpetuates a false concept of our audience.”

Folkerts added that the school, like the newspaper industry itself, has begun focusing on preparing students to work in a changing environment in which journalists face different roles and grapple with new technology, a subject faculty members discussed with Buttry on Feb. 23.

“Our visual communication program has been educating students in computer programs essential for creating news online and for multimedia documentaries,” she said. “They were ahead of their time, in fact, and the best recent graduates have been hired by nytimes.com and msnbc.com.”

The school is also reviewing its curriculum to make sure that all students have access to classes where they will learn to report and write news for a variety of platforms, from print and broadcast to the Internet, she said. Faculty are also working to ensure that students on advertising and public relations tracks can develop creative strategies for Web-based work, she added.

Aikat said that he was impressed by some of the strategies discussed at the Newspaper Next seminar, particularly having newspaper organizations use “idea résumés” in which they take 30 minutes or less to brainstorm and write down the potential benefits and drawbacks of ideas for creating growth and reaching a greater audience.

“Newspapers haven’t done that kind of thinking for a long time,” he said.

Nonetheless, Aikat also worried that Newspaper Next’s work was “too little, too late.”

“[The presentation] was wonderful to see, but I’m afraid nobody is recognizing how complex the problem is,” he said. “I was hungry for more.”

Aikat questioned the need for solving the problem of free content on the Internet.

“Any successful model for the future is going to recognize that people are getting used to free stuff,” he said.

He added that he thinks it is important to keep in mind that each community is unique and to avoid a one-size-fits-all solution, something that Newspaper Next also cautions against.

“What works in the San Francisco bay area may not work in the North Carolina bay area,” he said. “I think it would help newspapers to look within their communities to see how to be involved in more local ways.”

While Buttry’s Newspaper Next strategy and Aikat’s views of what it will take to help newspapers may differ, both men believe that it is essential that news organizations remain part of American life, even if the vehicle used to get news to readers shifts from print to the Internet.

“News organizations provide a watchdog on the government and a forum for discussion of public issues,” Buttry said. “Democracy can’t function without them, and tyranny’s first step is to suppress them.”

Aikat, who sees one of newspapers’ most powerful roles as “exposing the ills of society,” also sees them as a pivotal part of the country’s past – and future.

“I see newspapers as among the select sources of checks and balances in the country. They are a voice of democracy, and they are independent,” he said. “I’m really concerned if that voice gets stifled. I hope newspapers work out a better business model so they not only survive; they thrive as a source of social interaction, community building and commerce. And that would ensure that we continue to support this strong force of democracy.” ♦

Anna Sandelli is a senior in the school’s news-editorial sequence.