Small Circulation, Big Impact: English Language Newspaper Readability in Bangladesh

Academic studies on newspapers in Bangladesh revolve round mainly four research streams: importance of freedom of press in dynamics of democracy; political economy of the newspaper industry; newspaper credibility and ethics; and how newspapers can contribute to development and social change. This paper looks into what can be called as the fifth stream—the readability of newspapers. The main objective is to know the content and proportion of news and information appearing in English language newspapers in Bangladesh in terms of story theme, geographic focus, treatment, origin, visual presentation, diversity of sources/photos, newspaper structure, content promotion and listings. Five English-language newspapers were selected as per their officially published circulation figure for this research. These were the Daily Star, Daily Sun, Dhaka Tribune, Independent and New Age. The researchers did a content analysis of the front-page contents of five newspapers for a month. In this exploratory, descriptive and quantitative research, the instrument developed by the Readership Institute at the Northwestern University was modified and used. Data gathered were classified in four broad areas namely: 1) story analysis, 2) newspaper structure, 3) listings or types of content and 4) content promotion. The findings help understand the content of the English-language newspapers in terms of demographic and geographic focus, photo diversity, gender balance, news themes, news sourcing and news treatment. It also gives a clear picture of the newspaper structure in terms of space allocation for news and advertisement. In this manner, the newspaper industry will progress as it identifies problems and takes measures to remain relevant in a region where the print media are still on the rise although facing stiff competition from the electronic media and online news portals.