• by Michael Shields , June 7, 2004

While new research suggests that mainstream newspapers may not be the best way to reach Black newspaper readers, the real story may not be so black-and-white. The study, conducted by Amalgamated Publishers, which represents a nationwide network of Black newspapers, showed that the vast majority of Black newspaper readers do not read mainstream daily newspapers.

Dorothy Leavell, chairman of API, even went so far as to suggest that the study--which found that 87.6 percent of readers who read Black newspapers regularly do not regularly read mainstream daily newspapers--shows that mainstream newspapers don't do a good job of connecting advertisers to the Black community in general.

"Hopefully, this will put to rest once and for all the mistaken assumption of many advertisers that they can reach Black consumers through mainstream newspapers," said Leavell in a press release. "If you want to reach and motivate the Black consumer, you must utilize Black newspapers."

But Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, which conducted the study for API, acknowledged that the findings are open to interpretation--that mainstream papers do reach African-Americans as well. The study does actually measure what percentage of African-Americans read a Black newspaper.

In fact, annual newspaper readership research conducted by Scarborough Research for the Newspaper Association of America indicates that more than 50 percent of African-Americans read a mainstream daily newspaper in 2003 (based on a study of the top 50 markets). That compares with 54 percent of whites.

Of course, as newspapers have consolidated and readership has declined, both figures have dropped significantly from 30 years ago (61 percent of Blacks and 80 percent of whites read daily papers in 1970).

CNW's Spinella suggests that the audience for Black papers is in many ways independent of the general population in its behavior and attitude when it comes to reading newspapers. "I was surprised by the amount of crossover that does not exist with connection to mainstream readership," he said.

Spinella said that this lack of crossover may be partially attributed to a perception among Black readers that mainstream news is missing something. "It's more of a case that community news--local perspective of news, for whatever reason--mainstream news is not serving," he said of these readers' perspectives. "It's not a distrust, but a sense that they are not getting the whole story." Spinella said these readers often turn to the Black press for news on their native or ancestral countries that is not covered prominently in the mainstream press.

While the study's findings on reader behavior were surprising, the upscale quality of this audience was not, according to Spinella. The phone survey, which quizzed 121,692 regular readers of Black newspapers, found that these readers are affluent and well-educated (average income $64,615; 83 percent have some college; 59.2 percent have graduate or post-graduate degrees).

Bill Bradley, group media director at Optimedia, agreed that African-American readers were reachable through mainstream news. He did say that the Black press plays an important role, but only for certain clients. "If the African-American audience is a target that we want to segment (we would buy Black newspapers)," he said. "Otherwise we would not."

Black newspapers have been publishing since the early 1800s. These papers are typically weeklies with smaller circulations. However, papers such as the Chicago Defender and the Amsterdam News have decades-old reputations for crusading journalism.

These papers do have sizable readerships when viewed as a whole. The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), or the Black Press of America, a 62-year-old federation of more than 200 Black community newspapers, claims to represent a circulation of over 15 million.