TEMPLE: This test hangs on every word

Published August 11, 2007 at midnight

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Imagine if you couldn't turn off a TV show until you had seen the whole thing.

Or couldn't stop a CD until you had listened to an entire album.

Well, we tried that experiment with Thursday's Rocky Mountain News this week. Only in this case two reporting interns were assigned to read everything in the paper - except the ads. We cut them a break on a few other things, such as stocks (they had to look up five) and sports agate, too.

Why the test?

Well, I've got a confession to make. I don't read everything in the Rocky every day. Same goes for The Denver Post. I do spend more than an hour reading both papers before coming to work on weekdays, and of course I'm reading papers in print and online throughout the day.

But there's just not enough time in the day, even for a guy like me who's paid to do it, to read everything in my own paper every day.

So I wanted to know how long it would take for somebody to read the whole darn thing on a typical weekday, in part because now that the Rocky is published in what I like to call its new, even more convenient size, I occasionally hear from a reader who says it's too thin. (Remember: It's summer, so the papers are smaller, in part because there's less news and sports in summer. They'll get larger again soon.)

Now for the results. Three hours and 55 minutes for Kari Craig, a 21-year-old CU senior. And that's without YourHub.com, which comes with Thursday's papers. Kari was struck by the number of liquor ads. As Marshall McLuhan said, "The bad news of reality paves the way for the good news of advertising." Sometimes news can make a bottle of Scotch look even better.

Three hours and 12 minutes for Justin Coons, 22, also a senior in CU's journalism school. He called the project "a monumental task." Uhm, I think that description might be reserved for, say, building the Hoover Dam. Justin found his attention waning - OK, it was more like a drill bit to the head - when he had to read an entire story about school board politics. But he powered on, to speed through the Sports section in 22 minutes and Spotlight in 15. (It helped that we had a big photo spread on swimsuits.)

Kari and Justin are our future, in more ways than one. We hear it's their generation that's leaving newspapers. But they're both interested in news and invested in making a living telling stories .

Their experience Thursday was unnatural. We all know that one of the strengths of a newspaper is that people can scan the headlines and pictures to find topics that interest them. Newspaper readers don't have to wait for the stories they're interested in, the way TV news viewers have to do. What editors hope is that people find a hook somewhere in their pages that keeps readers coming back. For Kari's 17-year-old brother, it's the sports section. For others, it's the comics. Journalists need to be humble. It's not all about our work. (Remember, the two didn't have to read the ads. But readership studies show that ads are one of the biggest reasons people read newspapers and that they're a source of information and pleasure, even if only vicariously.)

One lesson I hoped the students learned from this exercise is that our readers are making decisions whether to stick with us every day. That can be easy to forget in a newsroom. My advice to editors is to ask whether they'd read a story if they weren't being paid to work on it. If their answer is no, they should stop and at least find a different way to tell the story.

The other lesson I know they took away is that great stories, photographs and writing matter. They lift the spirit; they engage readers and take them beyond their own lives. Stories like Clay Latimer's piece Thursday on Robert Rodriguez, a 17-year-old boxer from Greeley who's got a shot at going to next year's Olympics.

Justin and Kari are dreamers like Robert. Justin thinks there's always going to be a market for something you can hold and read, something "tactile."

I think he's right. I think newspapers - ink on paper - are going to be with us for a long time to come.

Few of us will be spending more than three hours a day with them. But if journalists do their jobs right, readers will feel that their newspaper fulfilled their need for information, inspiration or entertainment. The challenge we face isn't how long it takes to read the paper. Ultimately, the central question is whether it's worth reading. I know Kari and Justin are as committed as I am to making sure that there's only one possible answer.

Yes.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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