To free or not to free

Anyone who's talked to me for more than five minutes knows that I scoff at the strategy of publishing free "lite" tabloid newspapers to try to lure in people who don't read.

If you don't read, you don't read. This strategy strikes me as a desperate answer from providers who can't figure out how to pay for insightful and investigative local journalism. In our informal focus groups, we've found that there are lots of educated, affluent folks who read voraciously -- just not their local newspaper.

Lots of smart people, like Evan Cornag and those interviewed in this BusinessWeek article, disagree.

Tim Porter helps set them straight:

Somewhat lost in Cornog's lengthy exploration of civic literacy is a paragraph that mentions a report given at last year's APME convention by Robin Seymour, director of research and readership at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Writes Cornog:

Seymour "revealed the results of her research into the top items of interest for younger, so-called 'light' readers. In order, they are: health/fitness, investigative reports on important issues, the environment, natural disasters/accidents, and education." (Emphasis added.)

To me, those topics sound like opportunities for serious journalism. It seems at least a kernel of interest remains within the coming generations for substantive news. The challenge is to convert that interest into readership. But, and here is the question, readership of what?

That notion is echoed by a twenty-something looking for a reason to read the paper. And a headline writer who proves the point by missing it.

Comments

[Kimberly]

Strangely, I was thinking about this particular thought yesterday, when I ran into a Quick person on the street. I mean... if you can't finish a newspaper in 20 minutes and read what you want, who expects you to read one of these lite reads? I had no other thoughts on it, but if I thought about it anymore, I probably wouldn't be doing what I am supposed to be doing right now... writing for the "non-lite" pubs.