Papers Seek to Adapt to a Changing Readership

Earlier this week at a luncheon in Los Angeles, the publisher of the Knoxville Journal in Tennessee asked a waitress, a Latina, whether she read a newspaper.

The woman had come to the United States for the economic opportunity 12 years ago, Knoxville publisher Gerald Garcia recounted, and during the playing of the national anthem that had just completed, she had been the first one among those near his table to put her hand over her heart.

No, she answered him. “There is nothing in the newspaper for me.”

America is changing, and there is a grim feeling among some executives at the annual American Newspaper Publishers Assn. convention that newspapers must do more to change with it.

“Readership is going to be more diverse,” Peter A. Morrison, director of RAND Corp.’s Population Research Center in Santa Monica told a group of publishers Tuesday. The population is fragmenting into more segments--ethnic, cultural, social and economic. And “there is a sense of time as our scarcest resource.”

The American household already has changed. In 1970, for instance, 17% of Americans lived alone. In 1988, it was 24%. Perhaps more significant, in 1970 the largest group of households in America--40% of the population--consisted of married couples with children. By 1988, that number had shrunk to 27%, Morrison said.

The largest household group today, about 30%, consists of couples with no children.

In short, Ozzie and Harriet have been replaced by a patchwork America, with a wider rainbow of specialized interests and cultures and values.

How do newspapers, which in the era of newspaper monopolies have functioned by appealing to mass audiences in local regions, remain meaningful to this more segmented nation?

One answer, publishers have repeatedly heard this week, is that newspapers must change the ethnic and cultural makeup of their staffs, not as a matter of justice but of economic survival. Looking over the leaders of the newspaper industry in the audience at one panel Tuesday, ABC “Nightline” correspondent and syndicated columnist Jeff Greenfield said, “This is not exactly the United Nations out here.”

In the next 10 years, RAND demographer Morrison said, six out of seven new Californians will be either Latino or Asian. “But these are the groups most newspapers overlook.”

Another idea gaining currency is that newspapers should target specific groups of readers, to “niche market” within the umbrella of their mass-appeal newspapers.

Virginia Dodge Fielder, vice president of research for Knight-Ridder Inc. in Miami, said many of the techniques, such as new graphics or even trying to attract non-readers with things such as telephone information lines, is only “window-dressing,” inadequate to the task.

“An 800 phone number isn’t going to do it. Maybe separating your Calendar section and selling it to readers alone will,” she said, referring to the Los Angeles Times.

Indeed, a simmering issue now, particularly in larger cities, is whether large newspapers must in effect become several newspapers, as Fielder suggested.

“The mass market died 20 years ago,” said Laurel Cutler, vice chairman of the advertising firm FCB/Leber Katz Partners in New York and vice president of consumer affairs for Chrysler Corp.

“What the rest of us decided is that the country is a bunch of niches,” she said, referring to the marketing of consumer products, “and we are giving up market share for brand share.”

Newspapers have not moved adequately in that direction, she argued. The more newspapers try to add new sections that will appeal to more groups, the more they will “grow fatter and fatter . . . and the less meaningful you become to any one of these audiences. Why haven’t you tried going the other way?”

Why couldn’t one company put out different newspapers, she suggested, in effect different brands, in different languages, in different neighborhoods and aimed at different interests?

But several executives disagreed with Cutler’s view that newspapers must emulate the consumer product business and market different brands to different population niches.

“There’s a real problem in segregating audiences,” said Karen F. Brown, an associate at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla. “I need to know a little bit about what is going on in their world and they need to know a little bit about what is going on in mine.”

Shelby Coffey III, editor and executive vice president of The Times, countered that newspapers can reach different audiences without cutting up their newspapers. They can do it through zoning to different neighborhoods, by creating new sections that appeal to specialized interests and by making the paper easier to read so that people know where in the paper to find these items, Coffey said.

“We need to grow and be inclusive. We are an engine of democracy,” Coffey said. “Simply targeting will lead us all to become Avenue magazine,” he said, referring to an ultra-slick periodical in New York so narrowly targeted that it is literally aimed at the wealthiest on the East Side of Manhattan and those who aspire to live there. “That is not what newspapers are all about.”

Research also suggests that newspapers are losing women, who dropped as frequent readers from 61% in 1982 to 45% in 1987, according to Susan H. Miller, director of editorial development for Scripps Howard. To win those readers back, Miller urged newspapers to more seriously cover women and topics such as parenting, relationships and time-saving hints that have helped women’s magazines thrive.

Newspapers in general do a poor job of covering many of the subcultures that make up the new society, a failure that causes people to feel that they are being excluded from the society, a kind of “symbolic annihilation.”

More distressing, editors heard all week, is the poor state of education, which is creating a cultural underclass that crosses all ethnic lines and that might never pick up newspapers.

Since 1967, the number of young adults age 18 to 29 who read newspapers every day has shriveled from 60% in 1967 to just 25% in 1989.

“My analysis of young people’s recent trends in newspaper use can only be described as a dark cloud of typhoon proportions,” Prof. Gerald Stone of Memphis State University told a preconvention symposium Sunday.

One potential bright spot, demographer Morrison suggested, is that the population is getting older as the Baby Boom generation heads toward middle age. Older people have traditionally have been most loyal newspaper readers.

But to reach them, the newspaper of the not-too-distant future must be far different.

“Don’t think that because trends are slow doesn’t mean they aren’t happening,” said Fielder of Knight-Ridder. “We have to recognize that what we are doing now, if the trends continue, won’t work in the future.”

Times staff writer Jesus Sanchez contributed to this story.