Editor & Publisher, Oct. 2

NAA's New 'NADbase' Exposes True Reach of Newspapers

By Jennifer Saba

For too long, publishers have complained that the only metric newspapers are measured against is paid circulation. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) is trying to change that notion, and Monday, Oct. 3 it released the first comprehensive report on newspaper readership -- print and Web -- called the NADbase.

The NADbase looks at the top 100 newspapers and breaks out readership by gender, age group, household income level, and total reach. The report slices the numbers for daily, Sunday, daily cumulative (a five-day average) and Sunday cumulative (a four-Sunday average). In addition, it lists the paper's online activity by page views and unique audience.

"It's been a particularly vexing problem that newspapers have been the only medium which is not evaluated based on audience," said John Kimball, senior vice president and CMO of the NAA. "We've been relegated forever to, 'how many units did you sell today?'"

The database is not an attempt to diminish the importance of net paid circulation, Kimball explained. Rather, the idea is to give advertisers more of an understanding about who is reading newspapers -- in all their forms.

The 40-page report, which the NAA plans to release twice a year, culls data from Scarborough Research and Nielsen//NetRatings (both companies are co-owned by E&P parent VNU).

Contrary to some expectations, the fall report shows that more than two-thirds of 18-to-34-year olds are reading a newspaper sometime during the course of a week, and nearly half read a newspaper on any given Sunday. About 77% of adults read a newspaper at least once a week.

Among the specific examples, the report found that the Washington Post's Express and its Web site, washingtonpost.com, add 7 percentage points to its overall weekly reach.

At The Dallas Morning News, its youth and niche publications, Quick, Al Dia and its Sunday edition lift average market penetration of 24% daily to 40% across a week.

Forty-three million users, or nearly one-third of the Internet population, visited newspaper Web sites in July 2005 compared to 23 million for Yahoo News and CNN.com. Newspapers own 11 of the top 25 online news and information Web sites.

Forty-four percent of newspaper Web site users are younger than 34 and 50% have household incomes greater than $50,000.

The NAA, said Kimball, plans to follow up with this data with more reports on how advertisers can get their return on investment with newspapers. "It's a companion piece," he said adding it will be released later this fall and co-funded with the NNN. "It will also feed this value proposition with the general understanding that people engage with newspapers differently than they do with [other media]."