• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 4, 2006

Scarborough Research, the primary source of newspaper audience estimates on Madison Avenue, Monday released results from a year-long study combining the online and print editions of major dailies. The telephone study, the first of its kind, shows highly active online growth, overlapping somewhat with print newspaper consumption, at four major papers: The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune, and The Arizona Republic.

Scarborough's new measurement, called Integrated Newspaper Audience, looks at print consumption alongside "past-seven-day and yesterday audiences of newspaper Web sites in 2005," according to Gary Meo, Scarborough's senior vice president of print and Internet services. The data show that "like most major media, newspapers have been losing circulation and audience slowly and steadily for several years, but their online audience is growing," Meo said.

A second finding is of special interest to marketers: "We found the audience of newspaper Web sites is every bit as affluent and upscale as the printed newspaper audience--and they're younger," Meo said. "They have high incomes; they're well-educated; they're well-employed." For example, 37 percent of visitors to The Washington Post Web site were between the ages of 18 and 34. That number rose to 40 percent for 's (AJC) Web site--while 53 percent of that paper's online traffic had incomes of $75,000 a year or more.

What's more, readers who consume both print and online editions of newspapers are targetable as a highly engaged "core audience," according to Jim Wilson, director of research and audience development for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It allows us to go to advertisers and say--here's the reach that you get with print, here's the exclusive online, and here are the people who are using both--and that's frequency," Wilson said. "Those are the people who are most engaged with us, and you're building frequency on a pretty good demo."

Still, Wilson noted, the newspaper industry is bedeviled with structural problems that make it hard to rationalize transactions and business plans: "On the newspaper side, some companies have set up a separate company to run their Internet products. We started out that way quite a few years ago, and quickly discovered we needed to integrate online and print into the same framework, because we needed to be doing the same things... For sales folks we have people who are online specialists, and they do have some accounts that are online advertisers only, but they're embedded in the paper's sales team."

But Wilson warned that media buyers are themselves often responsible for missing the chance to leverage newspapers' entire media network. "When we go to--say--Verizon, for example, and we sit down and talk to their folks who buy newspaper, radio, and television, we'll tell them about AJC.com, and they'll say--oh no, that's a different agency." Meanwhile, at even the largest media planning and buying agencies, the right hand doesn't always know what the left hand is doing: "You might have an office doing online buys from New York and one doing print buys from Chicago," resulting in disjointed, inefficient campaigns, according to Wilson.

Finally, the newspaper industry's Web presence--like the newspaper industry as a whole--suffers from the sheer numbers of competing publications, which make it impossible for media planners to make national buys with a single point of contact. "On the national side it's so much easier for them to buy these big national sites" like CNN or MSNBC, Wilson said. "How do you buy the top 25 newspaper Web sites? It gets to be a pain."