By Mary Nesbitt and Stacy Lynch
The Readership Institute
“Content analysis? I’d rather stick needles in my eyeballs!”
Before lunging for the pincushion, here are three reasons why content analysis may be a good idea for your newspaper.
• Day-to-day newsroom operations are so absorbing that journalists can lose sight, over time, of what’s being covered, in what proportion and by whom.
• Content analysis gives you a concrete picture of what readers are reacting to in readership surveys.
• If you’re going to make significant content changes, it’s good to first establish where you currently stand.
The Readership Institute went through the pins-in-eyeballs stage when it analyzed the content of 100 daily U.S. newspapers as part of the Impact study of readership. And know what? It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s even now less bad than before, because out of that exercise came a reliable method for individual newspapers to analyze their own content without scrutinizing every item in every edition for several weeks.
Content analysis has been used for decades as a way to gauge how news is covered. By counting, measuring and classifying news coverage, you can get a reliable – and sometimes astonishing – picture of what’s really in the newspaper. The Institute’s analysis of 47,000 stories as part of the Impact study revealed some surprising truths about U.S. newspaper content.
The national picture: In many ways, newspaper coverage across the country is pretty consistent, whether the newspaper is a 10,000-circulation daily or a major metro (the range of sizes studied.) A typical U.S. newspaper offers a story mix emphasizing sports, politics, and disasters/crime. These three categories take up 56 percent of total story space.
Regardless of size, newspapers also offer a similar proportion of local news. Most devote 34 percent of space to local news, 16 percent to state and regional, 40 percent to national, and 10 percent to international. Larger papers devote slightly more space to international events, but the difference is minimal.
But some differences stood out. In some papers, 20 percent or more stories have “go and do” information (times, dates, phone numbers, directions, sources of more information etc.) Less than three percent of stories in other newspapers carry this kind of utility information, which is popular with readers. The Impact study also showed that newspapers with more go and do information have higher satisfaction and considered easier to read.
In some newspapers, less than three percent of stories are devoted to health, home, food, fashion and travel coverage, while in others it’s more than 13 percent. Again, Impact analysis showed that papers that offer more on those topics have a stronger brand perception overall, higher satisfaction ratings on those topics and higher readership.
A third difference: while some newspapers never run any in-paper content promotion highlighting upcoming stories, other newspapers average as many as six items per day. Telling readers about what’s coming up in future editions of the newspaper proved to be the most effective type of promotion for increasing satisfaction and readership.
It’s finnicky work but not difficult: In times when news hole and staff time are so precious, content analysis can be a vital tool for seeing just how resources are allocated and for tracking change over time. “Newspaper Content Analysis: A How-To Guide” gives step-by-step instructions and example forms that can be customized for individual newspapers. Download it free here.
The guide explains how to select newspaper issues for analysis and how to sample stories within those newspapers. It’s not necessary to read, measure, count or classify every story: the guide shows you how to select a representative sample that gives the best view of coverage with minimal effort.
Using the Institute’s methods, a newspaper would need between 75 and 120 hours to analyze its content (depending on the size of the newspaper). This doesn’t include data analysis time, which can be minimal or elaborate, depending on the newspaper’s goals. In either case it’s important to have a detail-oriented and meticulous person lead the process, working with a small group of careful coders who follow instructions well.
The Impact study’s content analysis quantified a large number of characteristics about each story including:
• What is it about?
• Who wrote it?
• Is it local, state, national or international?
• Does it have a photo, graphic or sidebar?
• How is it written?
• Does it have “go and do” information?
It also includes methods for analyzing agate listings and the amount and type of in-paper content promotion.
Customized measurement: As well as using the general format, newspapers can add new qualities – as long as they are characteristics that can be objectively, consistently and reliably measured among the coders. If you’d like to evaluate zoned coverage, for example, you could design measures to gauge how much coverage individual communities receive. If you’re concerned about the timeliness of coverage, you could design measures to gauge how long after the events news is printed in the paper.
At the end of the day, you have an objective way of looking at content that you can track over time. If you decide to increase certain types of coverage or change how some topics are covered, you can repeat the analysis after several months to see if those changes really are happening.
But it’s important to say that content analysis can only tell you what your content is, not what it should be. It takes judgment and editorial instincts to evaluate the results of content analysis and reader studies to decide what, if any, changes should be made.
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute, and Stacy Lynch is research manager. If you have questions or would like to learn more about the methods described in this article, contact Stacy Lynch at 847-467-2177, or s-lynch@northwestern.edu.
