The Wall Street Journal has been reporting combined print and online subscriptions for several years.

And, granted, the combined print and online numbers are more representative of readership trends, and they also are more comforting.

"Overall newspaper audience is a growth story as opposed to one of inexorable decline," says Gary Meo, senior vice president of print and internet services for Scarborough Research. "Their web sites are reaching younger, affluent people, and that’s good news for newspapers."

Following in this logic, Snedeker deduces that distinguishing print from online figures shouldn’t matter, because only the combined figure is representative of a paper’s penetration in its community. According to her, the real problem is then to sell this idea to advertisers.

Is selling this idea the “real challenge” for newspapers though?

If advertisers (and newspapers) haven’t bought into it, there’s a reason: online readers ‘don’t count’ as much in an advertiser’s eyes as a print reader, who will be more concentrated and spend more time reading and perusing the ad.

Snedeker eventually raises this question, “is the online visitor of the same value as the print reader?”

A recently proposed metric system considers than one month of online traffic is worth a week of print circulation – or something. It’s not hard to see how arbitrary this figure is.

Perhaps the main challenge then is not to combine and equivocate print and online readership figures. Instead it is finding a measuring system that would be convenient for newspapers and advertisers to measure the importance of both their print and online figures.

The Media Measurement Integration Task Force, supported by the World Association of Newspapers, has been created to do just that. It meets again in June.

Source: Media Life