Content audit offers a reality check on portrayal of young adults
One
key reason young adults of all races and ethnicities are unsatisfied
with the newspaper reading experience may be that they don’t see
themselves and their lives reflected in the newspaper’s pages,
according to The Readership Institute, a division Media Management
Center at Northwestern University in the United States.
A
mid-sized newspaper in the middle of that country conducted a content
audit, with the Institute’s help, to find out how well the editorial
staff was doing in including young adults in the paper. The editor had
previously done a content audit on the newspaper’s minority coverage
using an approach created by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
He adapted the ASNE audit form to focus on adults 18 to 39, and
recorded every appearance in a photo and every mention in a story as a
source or a subject.
The results of his study were stunning, the Readership Institute reports.
Over a two-week period: • 90% of the people in main news were under 18 or over 40 • 97% of the people in the community and features pages were under 18 or over 40 • 95% of the people in the local news pages were under 18 or over 40
There was a great gaping hole in the newspaper’s coverage.
Do
you have a young-adult coverage gap? Is it as big as this newspaper’s
was? The Readership Institute encourages you to find out by conducting
your own audit, using the attached form. You can make the audit as
thorough or as quick as you choose. At minimum, take two weeks of
newspapers and count every person mentioned in every story and
appearing in every photo. Note the number of those persons who are 18
to 34. Then tally the percentage by section and by total newspaper. If
you want to bring extra layers of depth to your analysis, do any or all
of the following:
•
Note if the story is particularly long (over 20 inches, for example) or
particularly short (3 inches or less) to learn if young adults only
appear in short stories and briefs, for example; • Note whether the story presents young adults in a neutral, positive or negative light; • Note how often young adults make it on Page 1 or section fronts, and how often inside the paper; •
Conduct the audit using a “constructed week” instead of a chronological
week of newspapers. By constructed we mean a Monday from one week, a
Tuesday from another, etc., to avoid a single news event from skewing
the results.
To use the form, go through the newspaper item by item.
• Fill out the top of the sheet, noting date of issue, section title, total number of pages.
•
Count the mentions of individuals. Indicate in the photo or story
columns how many are under 18, between 18 and 34, and 35 and older.
(This may be the toughest part, as many newspapers have dropped the
long-time practice of identifying people by age. Do your best, but err
on the side of estimating ages outside the target audience. You don’t
want to falsely inflate your young adult numbers.)
• Tally total numbers by section and by newspaper, and calculate the percentage that is 18 to 34.
The
Readership Institute says that conducting the audit is just the first
step and newsroom managers need then to do something about what they
discover “You will have to engage your entire newsroom in the process,
just as you would to correct an imbalance in coverage of minorities in
your community,” the Institute concluded.
For
detailed guidance on audits, audit preparation and audit follow-up, the
Institute recommends Covering the Community: Newspaper Content Audits
published by ASNE's Diversity Division ($5).
[WAN
found similar results in a worldwide study of the portrayal of children
in newspapers with this group most often in the news as victims. You
could do the same study with under 18 or under 15.]
For more information: E-mail:asne@asne.org The American Society of Newspaper Editors 11690B Sunrise Valley Drive Reston, VA 20191-1409 USA Tel: 1 703-453-1122
• 2. CLEAR JOURNALISM AMONG KEYS TO SUCCESS FOR PUBLISHER OF FIRST FRENCH DAILY FOR CHILDREN
François DuFour, shown here in his Paris newsroom with some young advisors, also edits l'Actu for readers aged 13 and older. Photo by Kaia Means, courtesy of Norske Skog
Ten
years ago, François DuFour and two friends, Jérôme Saltet and Gaetan Burrus founded Mon Quotidien, the first French daily for children.
François talked to the World Young Reader Network about how and why the
paper succeeded and also managed to spawn three siblings for other age
groups and now, an internet television show.
The Network: What is the main idea and how did you three come up with it?
FD: We already ran an educational games company, Play Bac, and wanted another way to market our games and books. Some research we did said the biggest barrier to selling books to kids is that they didn’t like reading. Actually, the original idea was for a monthly, but we realized that the long shelf life would not accomplish our goal: kids getting the reading habit. So we decided we needed to give them something fresh every day – just to take 10 minutes – but every day.
The Network: When did Mon Quotidien begin to succeed?
FD: At the start, no one thought it would work because, let’s face it, France is not a country where a lot of people read newspapers. But after two years it suddenly took off. A year after that, we launched the second paper, Le Petit Quotidien for 7 to 10-year olds, then two for the younger and older group (Quoti and l’Actu) in 2002. All together we have about 200 000 circulation.
The Network: What is news for kids?
FD:What’s most important for us is that we publish news that is really for kids, not for adults. For us the game is to find what is going to be of interest for kids in the day’s news.
One thing it is NOT is some form of softened, sanitized version of reality. No subject is taboo but it has to have an angle that is of interest to kids. In the case of the Iraq war. for example, we looked especially at what happened to the children there, and we answered children’s own questions about the war. We insist on clear journalism, telling the facts. For example, we wouldn’t say simply that the war is terrible, but give the facts behind such a statement: how many people have died. And we make sure to explain words they might not understand.
That said, we are careful. In our coverage of the Tsunami, we were clear that many children died but the only photo of a dead person showed only the top of a boy’s head – not his face -- as he was carried in the arms of his parents.
The Network: What doesn’t work? FD: A sure flop is every time we talk about a painting exhibition, so we have decided to give up. What also tends to flop is when we do a cover story about sports or movies or video games or music. Those are their passions, but they don’t have the same passion. It’s too specificl. With soccer, we lose all the girls, and we lose some boys. Movies, apart from Harry Potter, will be a flop.
The Network: What is keeping it going? FD: Today we benefit from a virtuous triangle: children who like to read news that is directed at them; parents who just like their children to read and teachers who welcome material which feeds into the school curriculum. Also we have the benefit in France of a very favorable postal rate that allows us to do home delivery very economically.
The Network: What is the role of children besides being readers? FD: We let kids help choose stories by picking what they would read from a journalist’s story list. They also write our movie and video game reviews and ask a daily question of a celebrity.
The Network: And teachers? FD: For each edition, we have a teacher who helps us make sure the language level is right. About 20 percent of subscriptions are bought by teachers.
The Network: And parents?
FD: Well, first of all they are the subscription buyers! And we’ve found they often keep on taking the paper even after their child moves out of the age group.
The Network: Why now, are you – champions of print – doing an internet television show "monquotidien.tv" at http://www.playbac.com/tv/?
FD: The celebrated 8 o’clock TV news programmes are too long with stories delivered and chosen for adults. Worse, most television news is boring for a kid. What we do on the internet tv news is a lot like what we do in print: keep it short, explain hard words and keep it fun, with a mascot – just like the one in the paper – doing the presenting.
----------------------------------------- 1. Get your audience involved. (We let kids help choose stories.) One boy and one girl, age 10, choose what they would read from a journalist’s story list.
2. Do news for the young, not for adults. (But that doesn’t mean “lite.”) No subject is taboo, but you must be clear.
3. Stick to the facts. (Be simple, but not simplistic. Explain.) NO: War in Iraq is terrible. YES: More than 1000 U.S.soldiers have died in Irak, plus thousands of others.
4. Make sentences shorter. (We limit sentences to 12 words.)
5. Make stories shorter. (We rarely have a story more than 200 words long.)
6. Define hard words. (We do it in a separate box.)
7. Check the language. A teacher helps us: Find the hard words to define. Assure background is right for age of the reader
8. Write normal headlines! (Just do journalism -- and avoid exclamation points!)
9. Use maps. (We use a ton of them.)
10. Use color. (Every page is full color, LOTS of color.)
11. Explain photos. (With information in captions that is not in the story.)
WAN Director of Development and Education 7 rue Geoffroy St. Hilaire, 75005 Paris France E-mail: amcmane@wan.asso.fr Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00 Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48
(FOR
YOUR BACKGROUND: WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper
industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 72
national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 102
countries, ten news agencies and ten regional and world-wide press
groups. In 1991, it established a global Committee to specialize in
young reader issues and, in 1998, a World Young Reader Network of
newspapers that make a special effort to reach the young.)
Find out more about WAN-IFRA's young readership development work in our e-report by clicking on the cover.
