Reflections on Content Quality in Newspapers

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2004 by Bogart, Leo

Can newspaper content quality be measured, and if, so, of what use is the quality measure? The dean of newspaper research examines indicators of quality and summarizes how these measures are related to various measures of business success.

The hallmark of any craft or profession is an, adherence to certain generally accepted standards of performance and a respect for meritorious achievement. The quality of a product or service can be judged by its creator or producer. Product quality is different from value - the individual consumer's judgment of the benefit relative to the cost. Value is always a matter of subjective judgment. Almost any improvement in quality comes at a price, and for many products, small improvements come at what consumers may consider to be an excessive price.

American editors and journalists share a fairly broad consensus on what constitutes excellence in the press. When experienced news people are asked what makes for quality, a number of words and phrases inevitably surface: integrity, fairness, balance, accuracy, comprehensiveness, diligence in discovery, authority, breadth of coverage, variety of content, reflection of the entire home community, vivid writing, attractive makeup, packaging or appearance, and easy navigability. In the American tradition, but not always accepted elsewhere, is the clear differentiation of reporting and opinion.

A term that sometimes is used as a surrogate for quality is "resources." Though resources are invisible to the reader, they are the sine qua non of all the other attributes. The relation of resources to quality is, in fact, a central concern of those who have thought seriously about the subject. In the scholarly literature, increased spending on a newspaper's resources is called financial commitment theory.1 In this issue, Rosenstiel and Mitchell use resources in their modeling of the relationship between "news quality" and business success.

For me, a key word, rarely mentioned, is "interesting." That may be because journalists instinctively understand that what bores some readers is of passionate interest to others. The newspaper's unique strength lies in its ability to assemble large amounts of information, much of it of concern only to small constituencies.

Are the attributes of a newspaper's content or appearance the true indicators of how good it is? Doesn't the value assigned by consumers (both readers and advertisers) provide a better sign of quality? Why shouldn't financial profitability or marketing success (definedby circulation or advertising growth) be taken as objective measures of editorial performance? A paper that grows may be deemed to be better than one that is just holding its own or losing ground.

Most American newspapers function on a local stage. Their commercial potential is constrained by the size and prosperity of their home markets. For this reason they cannot be evaluated like media that operate on a national scale (e.g., magazines, network television, films and books). Enormous social changes have affected different parts of the country in different ways and are reflected in individual newspapers' growth or stagnation, which may have no relation to their content.

Hollywood moguls seem to believe that a movie that brings in the greatest box office return is also the best movie, regardless of what the critics think of it. But the circulation gains and losses of a newspaper in a small midwestern county seat cannot be compared with those of The Arizona Republic in its growth market.

If the best consumer products tend to outpace their competition in market share, isn't the reverse also true: that strength in the market is in itself a demonstrable indicator of excellence? In the case of most consumer goods, purchasing decisions are influenced by factors other than inherent merit: price, effective distribution and promotion, past product history and the attractions of competitors.

Aside from public utilities, few products or services enjoy the kind of monopoly that all but a relative handful of American dailies exercise in their local markets. The process by which this has occurred has accelerated. In 2002, 45 markets had more than one paper. Only 19 of these had two publishers battling head to head, as in New York, Boston and Chicago. Twelve had joint operating agreements, with separate editorial managements but a common production and business operation. Fourteen had common ownership of morning and evening titles. Fifteen years earlier, in 1987, there were 112 markets with more than one paper-27 with fully competing ownerships, 20 with JOAs, and 65 with morning and evening papers produced by a single publisher.

Newspapers do, of course, face competition from alternative local sources of news and advertising, but they are unchallenged in their ability to provide the unique information services made possible by daily publication and a wide readership base. The monopoly position that most dailies enjoy derives from their unchallenged ability to provide a town or metropolitan area with the comprehensive information that provides residents with a sense of civic identity. This unique and entrenched advantage makes it difficult to use circulation penetration or audience level as a sign of quality, since readers have a wide range of tolerance for variations in content and style in what many consider to be a necessity of daily life.