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February 2003

Editors and Publishers, Listen Up

By Jim Morrison

The other day I came across a study about increasing the readership in newspapers that I'm sure was shocking to publishers who look to hire talent on the cheap. The study said that readers like well-written stories.

What's particularly interesting is the implication for freelance writers: the best way for publications, especially newspapers, to bolster their bottom line is to spend more and hire good freelancers. Let me run through a synopsis of the study and then see if you come to the same conclusion.

The study came from The Readership Institute of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University, a school that happens to be one of my alma maters. Their conclusions hit the bulls-eye.

What they looked at were the improvements newspapers could make to motivate people to spend more time reading, and read more sections more often.

Here are the top five "opportunities" to increase readership, in order of effectiveness:

1. Easy-to-read content.

2. Community announcements and stories of ordinary people.

3. Health, home, food, fashion and travel stories.

4. Government, war, politics and international stories.

5. Coverage of natural disasters and accidents.

What I find interesting is that style was paramount. "Unexpectedly, making a newspaper easier to read does not center around design or placement of articles," the study reported. "In fact, when we tested design components such as use of photographs, graphics, color, headers at the top of stories, indexing, placement, jumps and anchoring—none of them were related statistically to ease of reading. "

So, by "easy-to-read content," the survey does not mean lists of stupid pet tricks, fancy graphics or more charts and pictures. It means the writing.

"One of the most thought-provoking discoveries from the Impact Study is the importance of writing style," the study concluded. "Feature-style writing is found to increase satisfaction in a variety of topic areas: politics, sports, science, health, home and food, among them. A higher proportion of feature-style stories also improves overall brand perception, chief among them how ‘easy-to-read' the newspaper is."

What did the institute describe as "feature-style stories?"

"The writing is more narrative and stories are told with a beginning, middle and end," the study said. "Stories are often told through the characters or using anecdotes to help illustrate the events. They also tend to use more colorful language, are sometimes more playful, and usually engage the reader more than a traditional news story does."

In short, the kind of storytelling so many of us crave to do, but so few outlets purchase.

The conclusion becomes more interesting when you pair it with number three on that list: health, home, food, fashion and travel stories. Freelancers for newspapers typically write those stories. And in recent years, newspapers have drastically slashed their budgets and grabbed all rights for such stories, sending good freelancers looking elsewhere for work. Let's face it: A story for an in-flight magazine these days pays far more, perhaps double, than a story for a top-five metropolitan newspaper. Go down the ladder to a regional paper and you can make five or ten times writing the same story for a magazine.

Newspaper publishers' myopic view of the bottom line has led them to slash budgets for writers in precisely those sections that entice readers to spend more time with their papers.

And if you think that writing a narrative means writing longer, you're wrong. The study pointed to an example of two stories, one a typical pyramid-style AP dispatch, and the other a narrative from The Chicago Tribune, written about the same event. Not only did the narrative put the story in context better, it did it in 137 fewer words.

"Beyond increasing satisfaction with particular content areas, feature-style writing also improves positive brand perception," the study noted. "Newspapers that run more feature-style stories are seen as more honest, fun, neighborly, intelligent, ‘in the know' and more in touch with the values of readers."

I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but I'll bet the same conclusions apply to the increasing shallow content of magazines.

So, editors and publishers, there you have it. Do you want to increase readership and be seen as more honest and intelligent by your readers? Then hire writers who know how to tell compelling stories, not just researchers who can create yet another list for readers to toss away at the end of the day. Hire pros. And pay us accordingly. That doesn't mean $150 and no expenses for all rights to a 1,500-word story. It means a dollar a word, more or less, depending on circulation, plus expenses. It will be good for our bottom line. And yours.

Read the entire study at http://readership.org/content/editorial/hp_content.htm

And pass this along to your favorite editor or publisher.