Definitions

Circumplex
The circular chart used to depict graphically the elements of the different types of organizational culture. It is essentially a bar chart that has been turned into a circle to help illustrate that the factors are related to each other.

Completeness
How much of the newspaper consumers read in an average weekday and Sunday. One of three elements comprising the Reader Behavior Score, along with time and frequency.

Culture
How people are expected to behave in their organization in order to fit in. In common terms, "it's the way we do things around here." For more information, click here.

Feature-style writing
One of the four writing styles that were identified in the Impact study's newspaper content analysis. Feature-style writing is characterized by its narrative approach, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Frequency
How many days in an average week readers read or look into their paper. How many Sundays during an average month readers read or look into their paper. One of three elements comprising the Reader Behavior Score, along with time and completeness.

Geographic focus
In the Readership Institute's newspaper content analysis, each story was coded according to the primary focus of the story as local, state, regional, national, international, or none.

Impact
The Impact study, or Impact, is actually a collection of 12 studies centered around the same 100 U.S. daily newspapers. Each study focused on one aspect of newspapers, such as content, consumer, or newspaper organization. Together, they offer the most complete picture of the newspaper industry ever collected.

Opportunity Scorecard
The Opportunity Scorecard uses the results from the Readership Institute's national consumer survey to rank the content, service, and brand factors that hold the greatest opportunity for readership growth. Our Interactive Opportunity Scorecard allows you to explore how opportunity ranks change depending on your target market.

Origin
In the Readership Institute's newspaper content analysis, each story was coded according to the source from which it came as wire/news service, staff, reader, or unknown.

People management practices
The methods used by organizations and managers to manage and motivate employees. People management practices include techniques for selecting employees, giving performance reviews, training, and compensating.

Reader Behavior Score (RBS)
A score developed by the Readership Institute that can be calculated for each consumer. It captures several dimensions of newspaper usage such as amount of time spent reading, frequency, and amount consumed. The seven-point scale ranges from 1 (nonreaders) to 7 (heavy readers who read every day, spend large amounts of time with the paper, and read it completely). Click here for more information.

Reader orientation
The degree to which a newspaper is focused on and responds to its readers. It is a concept well tested in other consumer-products industries as "customer orientation." Click here for more information.

Readership
Typically in newspaper research consumers have been asked if they read or looked into a newspaper yesterday, so in discussions about readership the term has meant "read yesterday." Read-yesterday numbers help to indicate trends in newspaper readership, but don't lend themselves to useful actions to improve readership. The Readership Institute wanted to learn how newspaper readers behave, that is, how they consume the newspaper, so it looked at three elements of behavior: how much time a person spends with a newspaper, how frequently they read a newspaper, and how completely they read a newspaper. The three elements of time, frequency, and completeness comprise the RI definition of readership. By developing this way of describing reader behavior, Impact researchers were able to pinpoint specific things newspapers can do that will drive Reader Behavior Scores.

Readership opportunities
The Impact study identified many opportunities to increase readership. These readership improvement opportunities fall into three categories: 1) consumer satisfaction with various kinds of editorial and advertising content; 2) consumer perceptions of the newspaper's brand, attributes or personality; and 3) consumer perceptions of service. The Opportunity Scorecard (see above) ranks these opportunities for different target markets. High potential readership opportunities are listed here.

Satisfaction
Satisfaction is a weighted ranking that takes into account both the consumer's satisfaction with a factor and how important that factor is to the consumer.

Theme
In the Readership Institute's newspaper content analysis, each story was coded according to the primary theme - or topic - of the story. There were 26 themes, such as politics, business, sports, and science, representing the types of stories commonly appearing in newspapers.

Time
The amount of time consumers spent reading or looking at their newspaper both on weekdays and Sundays. One of three elements comprising the Reader Behavior Score, along with frequency and completeness.-

Writing style
In the Readership Institute's newspaper content analysis, each story was coded according to its writing style as news (inverted pyramid), feature-style (narrative approach with a beginning, middle and end), commentary (single author expressing a point of view), and how-to (article offering very specific information, the central purpose of which is to offer advice on a certain issue).