City A.M. boss tells NRS to ditch face-to-face interviews

Jens Torpe, the co-founder of City A.M., has said that if the National Readership Survey (NRS) is to survive it must abandon traditional face-to-face interview research in favour of web-based panels.

Speaking at The Future of Media Research on Tuesday, Torpe said that despite providing world-class audience measurement, it should call time on the personal interview methodology and embrace new and better ways of conducting the study.

“I was involved in launching quite a number of newspapers across the world and started out in media research,” Torpe said. “I have seen readership figures and media research, believe me, in every form and every shape from Chile to Hong Kong, and I’m happy to tell you that the numbers and the way it’s done [in the UK] is significantly more trustworthy than what I’ve seen in other markets.”

The NRS has used the face-to-face methodology for most of its 60 year service, however Torpe believes the time is right for a change in a media environment that has changed “beyond recognition”.

“For [City A.M.] it’s a very important decision,” he said when asked to give a publisher’s view on the survey’s future – which has been called into question after the Newspaper Publishers’ Association (now the NMA) served notice on the NRS last year as it seeks a “contemporary” audience measurement system.

The aim of the review is to introduce a new audience measurement system for published media brands covering all major routes to market – including print, mobile, tablets, PCs and laptops.

“For the last nine years NRS has not been able to register sufficient readers to register our reach,” said Torpe. “But using web research, YouGov has been constantly able to give us readership from between 200,000 to 250,000 readers over the past five to six years.

Torpe said that the research community tends to agree, even if only privately, that there are some serious flaws using personal interviews – at least for publications such as City A.M.

London and the South East areas are important to many advertisers and publishers, yet they are difficult areas to interview in because Londoners are home less often. Only by using shopping vouchers as incentives to complete the interviews has the NRS managed to improve response rates – but even then they stand at only 40%.

City A.M. – with a circulation of around 100,000 copies – is not content, yet still wants to be a part of the survey’s future. Torpe said other print media titles with substantial readerships, such as ShortList and Stylist, face the same problem – but one Torpe argues could be solved if the NRS shifted its model.

“It’s too difficult for younger media to enter the NRS measurement structure…but if you don’t try to stretch the boundaries you are very like to end up standing still,” he said.

Torpe, who launched City A.M. in 2005, said the “time is right” to give up the expensive personal interviews and use the web-based panels, as is the case in other European countries.

“I’m aware this approach is borderline heresy to many researchers,” he said, but argued that if web-based research was now sophisticated enough to correctly call tight election and referendum results, then it is ready to provide the readership of a newspaper.

A web-based approach could also mean, Torpe added, that the NRS could operate with much larger panels and reduce costs.

Media researchers attending Tuesday’s conference tended to agree with the publisher’s comments.

Director of Research the Media, Richard Marks, said the newspaper market had changed so radically that audience measurement had to work for the different business models now at play – whilst the IPA’s research director, Lynne Robinson, said it was hard to disagree with what Torpe had to say.

But she noted that the NRS was designed as a national readership survey – and that the likes of City A.M., despite impressively high readership and circulation figures, should really join JICREG, the body that provides a currency for Britain’s local papers and their websites.

“The NRS is designed for the large papers, but going into the future…it’s debatable if [all publications] can all be contained in the same survey,” she said, adding that there are a lot of “difficult choices” to be made.

“The industry currencies are very much about measuring the money at risk so it’s a really a very pragmatic decision to make.”

The first phase of the review into the future of audience measurement for newspapers, which is being led by ex-Mindshare boss Jed Glanvill, saw a ‘small number of bidders‘ make it through to the next phase earlier this year.

One of the first casualties of the review has been the NRS’s chairman, Simon Marquis, who announced last month that he will be stepping down as chairman of the board at the end of the year.

“In light of the full-scale review of the audience measurement system now under way, it seems only right to make way for new blood and a new system of governance for this important media sector,” Marquis said.

Despite the pressure now placed on the NRS, under Marquis’s tenure the NRS survey has witnessed the transition from print only, to one that provides measurement across print, online and mobile channels for the industry’s larger titles.

When the review was first called, the NRS’s CEO, Simon Redican, said he believed that the best solution for industry audience measurement must work for all three stakeholders in NRS – newspapers, magazines and agencies who represent their clients, the paying customers.

“Therein lies the strength of a JIC and it gives me confidence that the NRS is uniquely placed to deliver a solution which works for all parties and is underpinned by that most precious of commodities – trust.”

Whatever the results of the review, the new system is officially scheduled to be in place in 2016.