I was sitting in the Caf? Victoria on Main Street in Lakeport having lunch recently when I spotted a copy of John Naisbitt”s landmark book from the early 1980s, “Megatrends,” on the shelf right next to my table. I usually carry a book with me when I go out for lunch alone, to have something to do while I wait for my order. That day I forgot a book, so I grabbed the Naisbitt classic and read the introduction.
Interestingly, I learned something about the importance of my newspaper profession. Did you know that newspapers helped us win World War II? The rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, is that it wasn”t American newspapers that did this for us. It was the newspapers of Germany and Japan. Were the editors traitors to their country? No, they didn”t even realize that they were providing the assistance.
U.S. military intelligence officers were trying to figure out a way to gather information about our enemies that would ordinarily be ascertained from answers provided on public opinion polls. Obviously, it wasn”t feasible for an American pollster to go door-to-door on the streets of Nazi Germany or the Japanese empire during the middle of a world war. Some other way had to be devised.
Paul Lazarfeld and Harold Lasswell developed a method called content analysis. It involved closely studying the newspapers of Germany, to begin with. They were able to procure the newspapers, albeit a number of days after publication. By careful analysis, Lazarfeld and Lasswell discovered they could “?piece together what was going on in Germany and to figure out whether conditions were improving or deteriorating by carefully tracking local stories about factory openings, closings and production targets, about train arrivals, departures and delays, and so on.”
They were also able to put together fairly accurate war fatality statistics by reading the “area soldiers killed in battle” stories.
The content analysis process proved so successful with Germany that it was also used on Japan and yielded more good results there.
After the war, Lazarfeld and Lasswell both became well known communication theorists.
Content analysis of American newspapers has proven to be very helpful for politicians, marketers and others, ever since the end of World War II. The reason it works so well, according to John Naisbitt, is due to the fact that a newspaper”s news hole, the amount of space a newspaper devotes to news, is a “closed system.” The amount of space may change by the day of the week, but each day”s issue, week over week, are roughly the same size. So, as new things begin to occur, they push the old stories off the pages of the paper.
Analysts can learn about trends, fads and public opinion just by staying up on what is receiving space in the newspaper.
If you are a native of the Golden State, you may already be aware that California is the number one bellwether state in the country. California has long been known as a trend setter.
Some of the other primary trend indicator states are Colorado, Florida, and Washington. Content analysis experts follow the newspapers of these states closely, because national movements tend to evolve out of activities that have their roots in these trend setter areas.
While the news about newspapers has not been very positive lately, it is still encouraging, especially for those of us in the business, to realize that 50 million Americans a day buy a newspaper. That translates into, roughly, double that number of readers, since a number of family members often read the same copy. It is also uplifting to think that some of those readers are using the contents of the newspaper to plan national marketing promotions or to decide what their focus should be in an upcoming run for political office.
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Clear Lake Observer*American. He can be reached at gdickson@record-bee.com or called direct at 263-5636, ext. 24.
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