RESEARCH QUESTION: DOES QUALITY MATTER?

THE INFLUENCE HYPOTHESIS: Hal Jurgensmeyer, a Knight Ridder business-side vice-president in the 1970s, had a business model that defined the newspaper’s product not as news, not as information, but as influence. A newspaper firm produces, he said, two kinds of influence: societal influence, which is not
for sale, and commercial influence, which is for sale. But the two forms are closely linked because the latter cannot be strong without the former. In other words, quality matters.

THE WALL STREET HYP0THESIS: A news medium is primarily a platform for delivering advertising messages to eyeballs. Quality journalism and social responsibility are mostly cost without commensurate benefit to shareholders.
 

Problem 1: Measure quality in journalism

Problem 2: Measure shareholder rewards and their correlation with quality over time

Problem 3: Find out how to help consumers perceive quality in journalism
 

1. Test the belief that newspaper companies that take drastic quality-cutting measures to maintain steady earnings in poor economic times return more to shareholders in the longer run. 

2. Document the supposition that Wall Street believes quality has no economic benefit by replicating the Meyer-Wearden survey of analysts (Public Opinion Quarterly 1984). 

3. Write a case study of John McManus’s Grade-the-News website project in the San Francisco Bay area. 

4. Designate a small number of competitive markets for case studies and use accuracy (as perceived by news sources) to compare the quality of the newspapers. Design it as a print replication of the Hanson-Potter-Wearden TV study in one or more of their markets. 

5. Use survey research to determine norms for the ratio of news-editorial staff to readers at newspapers. 

6. Do the same for TV stations. 

7. Choose a convenience sample of markets where the newspapers are expected to vary by quality and apply Andrew Brack’s social responsibility measures with content analysis. 

8. Do community power studies (Floyd Hunter’s method) in the test markets and determine where the newspaper publisher fits. 

9. Calculate the newsroom diversity index for newspapers in the test markets. 

10. Determine the advertising market share that newspapers get in the test markets and compare it to their audience market share. (This may require developing a new methodology to relate print and non-print eyeball capture.) 

11. Search the literature to document earlier efforts to unpack the components of journalism quality as it applies to newspapers. Propose ways of updating it. 

12. Do the same for TV. 

13. Run field experiments on customer service by newspapers in the test markets. 

14. Count the number of civic associations with whom the publishers are associated. 

15. Evaluate the physical presentation (including design) of each newspaper in the sampled markets. 

16. Reread Weaver and Wilhoit for variables that can be updated in our sample markets. 

17. Use surveys or focus groups to test the public’s ability to detect quality journalism. 

18. Do secondary analysis of the social indicator items in the Knight Foundation and Putnam survey data to test the public’s ability to detect quality journalism. 

19. Update the Lacy case history of the death spiral of the Thomson newspapers. 

20. Write a case history of Milledgeville and its newspaper. 

21. Build a database from ABC records to assess each newspaper’s success at maintaining household penetration. 

22. Find a way to operationalize the concept of a newspaper’s influence and measure it. 

23. Correlate newspaper societal influence with ad rates, ad volume, and return to shareholders (after adjusting for size). 

24. Operationalize the measurement of long-term return to shareholders. 

25. Operationalize a way to classify investors along a time-horizon dimension: the continuum from day traders to Warren Buffet. 

26. Interview Warren Buffet and Donald Graham. 

27. Measure long-term changes in share of market (both advertising and readership) and find what predicts them. 

28. Develop non-Brack measures of quality than can be implemented with content analysis. 

29. Use focus groups to develop a PR/advertising campaign for helping readers/viewers be more effective media critics. 

30. Measure editorial vigor with the Thrift Index. 

31. Search for a correlation between readability of a newspaper and the education of its an audience as a measure of goodness-of-fit between medium and audience. 

32. Replicate Leo Bogart's 1977 survey of newspaper editors to get their definition of quality. 

33. Do the same for TV news directors. 

34. Evaluate the integration of a newspaper's online product with its print product 

35. Develop a checklist to evaluate the physical presentation of newspapers.