Jeff Sapier, Marketing Manager of New Scientist, was a Guest Speaker at an ACT WISENET lunch on the 9^th October at Vivaldi’s Restaurant, ANU Campus.  Jeff told us some interesting things about life at New Scientist, how the magazine is written and about a report they commissioned on readership and gender.  We asked Jeff to provide a written outline of his talk – it makes for an interesting and enjoyable read.   If you have further enquiries, please contact  ACT Convenors, Julie Christie or Juliet Lloyd-Smith or the National Convenor, Anna Robinson  (contact details on the Contacts Page).

New Scientist Reader Analysis and Gender Trends

 New Scientist commissioned various research projects in the last couple of years in an endeavour to learn more about why people read NewScientist and which articles they prefer. Some interesting results have come to light and the following summarises reader trends based on differences between male and female readers.

Covers
NewScientist is well-known for highly creative graphics on covers. But many don’t realise there’s quite a science in cover design itself. In general we have found that covers featuring unpleasant images such as earthquakes or images of animals dangerous to humans, sharks or snakes for instance do not sell well. A strong indicator that NewScientist readers are different to other magazine readers is that covers featuring attractive women do not sell whereas some other magazines would not dare to go without. In NewScientist sex does not sell. Some of the best selling covers have featured a man holding a giant marijuana leaf, a white face mask with ‘black holes’ and a time machine.

 

Readership General
NewScientist readers represent a very broad age demographic, however the 30-39 bracket is the most well represented at 45% while another 25% are aged between 40-49. 12% are 50-59 and very encouraging is the youth bracket of 18-29 at 15%, the remaining 3% are over 60.

Male to female readership ratio is 65:35

76% of all readers read NewScientist at home, 11% on journey to/from work, 9% at work and 4% … well let’s say somewhere else. 45% of readers spend more than 2 hours reading NewScientist each week. Although we sell an average of 25,000 copies per week, a staggering 270,000 people in Australia get to read them.

 

Readership Patterns
Over the years NewScientist has adjusted the amount of information (headlines, titles, text, photo’s, images and graphics) on the page to make it easier for the reader to decide what they would like to read. Each page in news has at least one photo or graphic to assist drawing the reader into the articles. However no matter what we do with layout, the same old pattern continues in that women prefer reading biology and medicine and men prefer physics. Professional scientists score almost every article lower than the layperson does, as do the higher money earner than lower earners. Perhaps the former have higher standards and are less easily impressed. Interestingly the pattern was reversed with professional scientists scoring our most popular sections, The Last Word and Feedback, highest.

One major change with the last relaunch was to change the news section to four columns across instead of three, with features remaining at three, this is to do with the difference in how people read short ‘newsy’ items which need to be punchy and easy to read. Readers commit to reading features so the longer lines of three columns suits this section better.

 

Other reading
A strong proportion of women read The Australian newspaper (Science and Higher Education sections) although men also scored highly on The Australian, the majority read The Financial Review although this was the next highest for women.

 

TV
When asked what TV they like to watch, more women readers watch documentaries, Discovery Channel and SBS while men were more inclined to watch sports and science fiction. ‘Report’ format science shows such as Catalyst were watched equally by both sexes.

 

Radio
Interestingly the majority of readers listen to the Triple J network (also known as the youth network), which also had the highest proportion of women to men, other top scorers for women were Radio National and Nova. Men were far more likely to listen to AM talkback stations.
 

Attitude
When asked how they describe themselves, women ticked a much greater number of categories than men. The categories women chose follow in descending order.

An optimist, solutions-oriented, inquisitive, an active member of the community, approachable/warm, extrovert, passionate.

Men scored highly with solutions-oriented only.

 

Why Read NS?
When asked how are they using NewScientist? men mainly responded with to keep connected to the broader scientific community, to keep up to date with scientific and technological advances or as a reference guide. Women chose one segment more than any other – for enjoyment and entertainment, although this was the 4^th selected category for men it was the highest category overall.

In another category asking what messages would be best to get more people to subscribe to NS, a distinction can be seen with men leaning more towards ‘information you can’t get elsewhere’ and ‘best weekly news wrap-up’ while women were more inclined to describe it as ‘entertainment for the brain’ and ‘for the enquiring mind’.

 

Influence to Purchase
Women were clearly more inclined to subscribe to NS than men who said they prefer to buy at the newsstand. However both scored ‘a great subscription rate’ highest when asked what would influence their decision to subscribe, of the other options women were more likely to go for ‘a chance to win a prize’ than men who preferred ‘a free gift’.

 

Advertising
Top preferred categories for women were ‘travel’, ‘technology and electrical’, ‘automotive’ and ‘beverages’. Men preferred ‘technology and electrical’, ‘telecommunications’, ‘banking and finance’ and ‘automotive’. ‘Recruitment/classifieds’ scored lowest overall but much higher with men than women.