How valid is the Newspaper Readership Institute's work?

I had an interesting dialogue today with one of my favorite, provocative newspaper people -- designer Alan Jacobson. Alan just wrote a fascinating article that challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom of what matters in newspaper design. Here's the direct link: www.brasstacksdesign.com/design_matters.htm I think this should be required reading for any number of people in my industry.

In it, Alan questioned the effectiveness of the work of Northwestern University's Newspaper Readership Institute. He asks if papers that have embraced the work really have seen much in the way of circulation gains. By measuring and then improving something called a Reader Behavior Score, the NRI argues that newspapers can move a great distance in winning and keeping readers. But Alan's point is one worth asking. Has this prescription worked? (See www.readership.org for more information.) I told Alan today in a back-and-forth email that I think the NRI's work can be very valuable, but it's the application of the work where the controversy lurks. Here's a revised version of more of what I said:

I do recall NRI saying that moving up the RBS is no guarantee circulation will go up, which makes sense when you think about it. Lots of other variables influence circulation .. from changing market forces to some guy in an old pickup truck either delivers the paper late or throws it in the bushes. There is no "automatic" way to accomplish higher circuation. I drink Slimfast every morning and I know two things: a.) If I do that and a lot of other things, I should lose weight & b.) Slimfast by itself won't automatically cause me to lose weight.

The RBS is measuring the behavior of your existing readers. So, in theory, you could satisfy them but not move the meter much. I'll use one of my former papers, The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., as example. We could have had the happiest readers in America, but it wouldn't have changed that we were trapped in the afternoon in a perfect a.m. market. Still, being able to show that your existing readers are spending more time with the paper and are more satisfied with the product is a good thing in and of itself -- and an advertising dept. ought to be able to use that effectively.

I suspect that the one metric that could best apply as a test of whether a high RBS helps is to look at the subscriber churn rate. In other words, if RBS goes up, your churn rate should be going down because the readers are more satisfied. That's the question I would ask of papers that have really embraced this: What has happened to subscriber churn? Plus, if the churn rate starts dropping, you should have an enhanced opportunity -- external market factors aside -- to grow circulation because the newspaper now has more time to focus on new sales and continuous improvement (further driving up RBS) instead of re-selling people you've lost.

Institute founder John Lavine has long argued that increasing RBS and reaping real results involves the whole newspaper, and maybe that's the most powerful point of all. RBS was never intended to just be a newsroom challenge, and I suspect a lot of papers have focused excessively on the newsroom piece without really looking at everything else, from circulation service to advertising information as a readership driver. The desire of readers for advertising as content is a huge potential way to build readership. Think about it. Don't you want to see ads from the stores -- big and small -- where you shop? It's certainly fair to say that major design and news content changes -- no matter how good they might be -- only represent a few of the many puzzle pieces in driving readership up.

A final point is that the industry increasingly is selling aggregation of audience, not pure circulation. While some of this is, no doubt, defensive given all the gloom and doom flying around, it just makes sense when you think about it. In Cincinnati, for example, if we combine the audience we have in our daily, weekly and online products over a week, we have one heckuva powerful argument to make to advertisers about reach, and it's a very quantifiable and legitimate case to make. (Our daily circulation is up a bit, by the way.)

If the NRI work can help a newspaper stabilize daily circulation numbers and even grow it a bit, that's a huge help as newspaper companies focus on building audience in non-daily products. If RBS, or similar methods that don't have the Readership Institute on the letterhead, gets applied in a holistic way across an organization, it ought to be successful. The reason is simple. At the end of the day it's about attracting and keeping satisfied customers. It's about stirring passion and meeting needs people might not even realize they have. That spells success in any business.

OK, those aren't exactly new ideas, but they've never been more powerful. Call me idealistic, but I think there is nothing less than the heart and soul of not only journalism but the quality of our public discourse at stake in the coming decade. I refuse to accept that both are damaged beyond repair. When I retire in 10 or 12 years, I want to believe that my generation addressed these challenges and smoothed the handoff for the leaders who will follow.