Abstract:

The CESP has carried out two types of experiment on measuring First Reading Yesterday (FRY). The first was performed during the National Readership Survey (NRS) in 1988. A questionnaire on yesterday reading was given by phone three weeks after the face-to-face interview. The results calculated from FRY were compared to the Recency Reading results obtained on the same sample. Due to lack of consistency between the two sets of results, especially for the monthlies, this method has now been dropped. Following this initial experiment and research carried out in other countries such as the USA and Netherlands, the CESP introduced a new method for measuring FRY in the Multi-Media Time-Budget Survey. Carried out over the period 1991/1992, the survey was not intended to be an audience measurement survey, but a tool for inter-media comparison. Nevertheless, the time-budget approach has proved particularly useful in identifying FRY, which is notoriously difficult to measure. In this second experiment, the CESP used all the time-budget information acquired, i.e.: place of reading, time of reading, number of times the issue was picked up, etc., combined with a source of copy question. The FRY question was thus asked indirectly. Due to the sample size (18,000), the data collected could not be used as Average Issue Readership for each title. However, analysing the results showed a consistency with not only the NRS results but also the circulation figures in terms of market shares.