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Newsprint Access and Readership in Ghana

Compared to TV and radio, weekly reach of newspapers is far smaller in Ghana—only about a fifth of those surveyed said they had read a newspaper in the last week. These people also had a distinct profile: predominantly young, educated men in urban areas (particularly the capital, Accra) with relatively higher incomes (Table 1).

Table 1
         

While the newspaper audience is far from representative, the medium is not necessarily a poor way to reach a broad audience. Active word-of-mouth networks, as described above, can transmit information between regular newspaper readers and others in their communities.

Opinion leaders tend to be regular newspaper readers and are also typically at the cores of such networks, allowing a fair chance that newspaper information will be disseminated through opinion leaders to others in their communities.

Only four newspapers (the Daily Graphic, the Junior Graphic, the Mirror and the Ghanaian Times) were mentioned by at least 5 percent of respondents nationally as ones that they read most often, reflecting once again a diverse media market. Among the four, the Daily Graphic stood out as substantially more widely read than the others (Chart 1). The Junior Graphic, though fourth overall, was mentioned more than the Mirror or Ghanaian Times by young respondents (15-29), its target audience.

Chart 1
           

Although women were less likely to read newspapers at all, they mentioned the Mirror and Junior Graphic as often as men did, perhaps suggesting that those two have more appeal or are more accessible to a female audience (Chart 2). Indeed, both are publications of the Graphic Communications Group (also the publisher of the Daily Graphic) that were designed to appeal to broader audiences. 

Chart 3
        

The publisher describes the Mirror as a weekly newspaper focusing on “social and gender issues as well as health and fashion. It is specially packaged with soft news for the comfort of and relaxation of its readership over the weekends,” and says that the Junior Graphic is intended for children, “to promote the reading habit in children… [and serve] as a forum for children to learn about issues around them, while helping to facilitate functional school work.” [1]

More than half of the survey respondents declined to comment on print media’s trustworthiness, and even among those who did, many simply answered “do not know” (Charts 4-5) As such, trustworthiness opinions are drawing from a different subsample than those who commented on the trustworthiness of information from radio and TV, making it difficult to compare the results directly.

Chart 4
                

Chart 5
                 

However, the results do suggest that fewer respondents believe that print media provide trustworthy information. This could in part reflect lower familiarity with newspapers and magazines, though qualitative research conducted by AudienceScapes in Ghana suggests that another factor may be readers’ dissatisfaction with perceived sensational coverage in many news stories.

Chart 6
           

The AudienceScapes dataset also provides some insight into why so few respondents read newspapers regularly (Chart 6). They gave a variety of reasons, but the most common was that the respondent was not sufficiently literate to read and understand printed content. This characteristic was notably prevalent among women (59 percent of women who did not read newspapers said they could not read them), people over 45, and those with no formal education. The World Bank estimated the adult literacy rate at 65 percent in 2007; according to the AudienceScapes survey, only about 40 percent can read English easily. [2]

The availability of newspapers themselves was cited as a problem far more often by rural dwellers than by urbanites, and it emerged as particularly problematic in the remote Upper West Region (where half of non-readers said newspapers were not available in their area).


             

[1] “Publications,” Graphic Communications Group website, http://www.graphicghana.com/graphic_corporate/publications.html

[2] World Development Indicators Database. The World Bank Group, April 2009.