What does engagement mean for newspapers?

Simon Owens, who writes at another future-of-the-media site called Bloggasm, recently interviewed Mary Nesbitt, who is the managing director at the Readership Institute at Northwestern University.

The Readership Institute recently conducted a study (warning, PDF!) where they surveyed, essentially, reader engagement for newspapers.

Simon’s key takeaway is that newspaper readership is not really growing with online offerings.

I think the statistics in this report, like all statistics, can be misleading. It’s far more reliable to simply count numbers - for any given paper, compare your print subscriber base to your unique URLs; that will tell you which audience is larger.

If a newspaper’s print audience is larger than its web audience, that newspaper is behind. It’s time to start using the paper product as a marketing tool for your online property.

The report also lists this troubling conclusion:

That is, respondents rated “Gives me something to talk about,” “Looks out for my interests,” “Ad usefulness,” and “Touches and inspires me” higher for the print newspaper than the Web site. These differences in the ratings are statistically significant. Since experiences correlate with behavior, it is not surprising that the higher engagement level with the print product translates into higher readership, whereas lower engagement with the Web sites is reflected in lower usage.

This is problematic not simply because fewer people are checking the web site, it it problematic because it indicates that users are less engaged with the web product than they are with the print product. And since engagement is what really drives ad revenue, newspapers should be working double time to bring their web audience up to par with their print audience.

This seems like a natural thing to me. The internet is by its nature an interactive platform. Committing to good, moderated discussion areas (comment sections) attached to articles would be a good start. Make sure to feature community input on the site. Hold high-visibility contents. Reward active news readers by having regular trivia sessions.

These are all things that would at one time have been very expensive to do (you would have needed get people together at an event). Now the online space can stand in for a real world venue for free. Take advantage of it.