Survey Reveals Disconnect Between Publishers, Readers

Over at Reflections of a Newsosaur, Alan Mutter summarizes an ongoing survey of newspaper publishers and readers conducted for the American Press Institute, a survey that was discussed at API’s gathering of executives today in suburban D.C. The survey collected data from 118 papers in the U.S. and from more than 4,000 consumers surveyed through those papers. (Here are the slides from the presentation by Belden’s Gregory Harmon and ITZ’s Greg Swanson.  This thing is absolutely fascinating.)

Reading Mutter’s analysis this morning, this jumped out at me:

While 68% of the publishers responding to the survey said they thought readers who objected to paying for content would have a difficult time replacing the information they get from newspaper websites, 52% of polled readers said it would be either “very easy” or “somewhat easy” to do so.

The discrepancy’s already a bit startling, but let’s think about it further for a moment. I’m not a statistician or a demographics analyst (and I don’t have access to the survey methodology myself), but I’d put a fair amount of money behind this bet: People who answer online newspapers’ surveys about newspaper readership tend to be pretty dedicated newspaper readers. This survey is a far cry from enticing bored Facebookers into figuring out what Smurf they are — you’re going to get people who are at least interested in and probably fairly concerned about newspapers and their future.

But even within that presumably interested and engaged group, more than half of respondents say it would be either very easy or somewhat easy to replace the information they get from newspaper Web sites. What would those numbers look like if they survey included less-committed readers? I bet the numbers would show that around 75% of readers think it would be pretty easy to replace the news. Meanwhile, nearly 70% of publishers think readers would have trouble doing so.

That’s a frightening and fundamental disconnect, one that underpins so many of the newspaper industry’s problems. Put simply, publishers have a wildly inflated view of their content’s value compared with that of the very people they’d ask to pay for it. To put it mildly, that’s not a good foundation for a business plan.

But wait — because it gets worse. Readers were asked where they thought they’d get their news if content from the local online paper was no longer available. 68% of readers said they thought they’d do so from other local Web sites, while just 30% said they thought they’d turn to the print edition of the online paper. But when publishers were asked the same question, 75% responded that they thought readers would turn to the print edition.

That’s an even bigger disconnect — I wonder what Paul Farhi thinks of it? And given the challenging transformation the news industry faces, I find it even more frightening.

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