What People Read in the Newspaper -

Or at Least What They Read 3 Days Before Pearl Harbor

When you’re sipping your cup of coffee and reading your morning paper (does anybody still do that?), do you ever wonder, “Why did they print that story? Who would read that?”

Newspapers wonder the same thing. And so do their advertisers, or at least the few advertisers they still have.

For many years a company called The Advertising Research Foundation would conduct reader surveys and publish the results in booklet-sized reports that showed how many people read each story and what percent were men and women. They would provide the reports to the sponsoring newspapers.

Three years ago I found a trio of these old newspaper advertising research reports at a flea market: one for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, one for the Hollywood Citizen-News and a third for the Knoxville News Sentinel. (None for the Kingsport Times News.)

Of course the one that interested me the most was the News Sentinel. I was a sports stringer for the paper when I was in high school. I read it daily when I was in grad school at UT. And I read it today.

The subject of the research report was the News Sentinel issue of Dec. 4, 1941 (78 years ago today), especially interesting since American history was about to be altered in three days.

The report was of interest to me for the old stories but also for the research numbers for each story and ad! Some ad readership was so small (one percent of total readers for several ads) that I suspect the News Sentinel’s ad sales department didn’t let the booklet out of the building.

Front Page

Circulation for the edition in the study was 60,788. More than 400 readers were interviewed for the study – 214 women and 211 men.

97 percent of readers read at least one story on the front page. I’m amazed it wasn’t 100 percent.

The top story was about a visit by the Air Force chief to the Alcoa Aluminum plant – 65 percent of readers looked at the story.

Readers were also interested in a story about appropriations for TVA dams, in particular Douglas and Fontana – 53 percent of men and 32 percent of women.

 A story about Turkey getting Lend-Lease aid was particularly uninteresting to female readers – only 7 percent. Only 4 percent of men read an item about the wedding of actress Ana Nagel.

(I am posting the research study page with readership numbers and also a clean and legible copy of the same page for curious readers who want to read about what was going on in Knoxville days before Pearl Harbor.)

Radio Page

The most popular item on the Radio Page was…a photo! 56 percent of men and 39 percent of woman looked at a photo of a steel bridge in Argentina. Next in popularity was a service comic panel – “Hold Everything” - with 48 percent male and 49 percent female readership.

The radio schedule was more popular with women than men – 44 percent to 29 percent.

Movie theater ads seemed to draw 13 percent of each gender.

An ad for Ballet Russe performance at UT drew only one percent of readers.

Sports Page

The top story was a Hot Stove League report on a roster shakeup of the minor league baseball team, the Knoxville Smokies, by new manager Bert Niehoff. 45 percent of male readers checked out the story; only 9 percent of the female audience read the report. In fact readership of the page was strongly skewed to men: 59 percent of men read at least one story while only 27 percent of women read any sports.

I’ve also posted two Comics pages.

You can analyze the numbers yourself.