Measuring Another Dimension of Newspaper Readership

S of news readership, as we have come to know and use them, are mostly one-dimensional. They measure something akin to impressions: if a reader has sampled a story, he is counted as having read It, No measurement is ordinarily made of how much of the story he reads, or the order in which he reads, or the interest and pleasure with which he reads, or the difficulty he has in comprehending, or the amount and accuracy of his recall, or the effect on his opinions or actions. Yet all of -these are legitimate dimensions of readership. At least two of them may be more useful to an editor than ordinary readership percentages. All of them are important to our knowledge of how a newspaper is used and what kind of job it does, and therefore to better editing and understanding of news and newspapers. The study here reported was made in an attempt to throw some light on one of these additional dimensions-depth. How much of a story of given kind and length does the average reader read? How fast do readers drop off throughout a story? Does a long story lose readers faster than a short one? Does a weekly or a daily have greater depth of reading? A small daily or a large daily? How is depth of reading related to the popularity of the story and to its stylistic readability? How much of the news content of a given kind of paper does the average person read? When a reader stops before finishing a story, where does he stop? What makes him stop, and what leads him on? That is the kind of question we tried to face up to in this study. Toward answering these questions, we made 600 readership interviews, divided into three matched samples-200 on a weekly newspaper of a little less than 3,000 circulation, 200 on a daily newspaper of a little less than 10,000-circulation, and 200 on a large city daily with circulation over 300,000. To check the results of these inter-