(Mary Nesbitt)

We often hear from news consumers that they like "whatever happened to" stories - the ones that follow up a person or issue that was in the news for a time and then dropped from sight. If there were enough hours in the day, we at the Readership Institute would follow up for our readers every promising initiative we’ve been directly involved with or heard about and report what happened next, for better or worse.

It’s a very long list, and I’ve just made a start, checking in with The Wichita Eagle, whom I helped two years ago run a "charrette". The brainchild of publisher Lou Heldman, it was an intensive brainstorm and quick prototyping exercise which came up with new products that were developed, mocked up and quickly tested in the span of three days. People from all departments in the building participated.

The idea was to be speedy and not perfect, to settle on a small number of big ideas that had a chance of significantly changing how readers experienced the newspaper - and then to launch at least one product quickly.

I knew The Eagle had executed two of the three big ideas the team came up with (and, it turns out, will launch the third later this summer) so I asked editor Sherry Chisenhall for an update.

All initiatives were intended to make The Eagle more essential and useful to light and time-pressed readers. First out of the blocks was WichiTalk, a name which captured the chatty, unpretentious, real-people focus of this daily tabloid section which launched a couple of months after the charrette.


Q: Has the original positioning and "feel" persisted, or has it evolved into something else?

A. We were shooting for primarily the 30- to 45-year-old working woman - content hitting on hot-button issues for that reader (fashion, health and fitness, family, shopping, etc.) That original thinking on the target audience is still our goal. One thing I've learned is that we have to constantly strive for balance: What interests the 28- to 32-year-old, for example, is often different from the 44-year-old. The needs and interests of that audience are certainly not homogenous, and the trick has been focusing on content, particularly cover stories, that don't appeal only to a 35-year-old mother of two. In other words, being predictable in the focus of content, but not predictable in the content itself. We can still do better at mixing up that content, but most of the time we do a good job. Our goal is still to seek content that appeals to that mostly younger female demographic - women on the go, looking for useful information to navigate a very busy life.

Feedback from readers has helped us find the sweet spots - useful fashion advice (how to go from office to dinner party with small clothing maneuvers, for example), and cooking quick and healthy. The editor of that section, Lori Buselt, is doing an outstanding job of consistently seeking feedback, then using it to shape future issues. I think our staff has gotten more comfortable with the tight audience focus, so we hit the mark almost every day.


Q. The subject matter as well as the tabloid size makes WichiTalk different from the rest of the paper, but what other characteristics differentiate it?

A: Its focus is so niche, and without apology. Sometimes I hear men scoff at the section because it's "so female." That tells me we nailed it. To be fair, I do hear from men who also flip through the section, but for the most part, it feels very clearly geared toward a busy female audience. For so long most newspapers have looked for more ways to appeal to a broader audience. WichiTalk doesn't even try. It has a singular mission and stays focused on it. It's also the most successful content we've created that ALWAYS resists the urge to slip into longer narrative stories. Its format is about packing information into concise forms, and it continues to succeed at that.


Q: Have you done any readership surveys or solicited other readership feedback? How has it been received by your target audience?

A: We haven't done formal readership surveys. Our assessments have been heavily anecdotal, but broad and with consistent results. The readership skews heavily female, and feedback from that audience has been almost entirely positive - enthusiastic, even.


Q: How have advertisers responded? And are ads consonant with the editorial content?

A: It's still a work in progress. We're doing better at ad volume and ad content in line with the mission, but we aren't there yet.


Q: After WichiTalk, you moved on to create a weekly hyper- local business section. How is it faring?

A: Business Today is built off the lessons (good and bad) that we learned from WichiTalk. We were taking on a well-established print competitor in the market, and we spent even more time defining the mission and strategy than we did with WichiTalk. In my view, it was an even riskier move because we were not the best source of micro-business news and needed to knock someone else off that hill. The new section involved a nearly 180-degree shift in the mission of our business coverage, and we had to talk the business staff through that shift, and then prove it to the business community. Like WichitaTalk, it focused on a niche audience - avid and moderate business news readers. Casual business readers are welcome, but they aren't the target. The focus is relentlessly local, micro business news.

Even more than WichiTalk, the Business Today section was a cross-divisional effort. It's probably the best job we've ever done of working together to conceptualize, promote and launch a new news and advertising product. It's been incredibly well-received in the business community - beyond my aspirations for what we would achieve in our first nine months or so. And advertising content is in line with the mission and exceeding goals. We had a bold, creative and smart promotional plan put together by a local agency (Howerton+White Interactive) that delivered by far the best launch and sustained result of any campaign we've ever done.

The keys to success were choosing the right niche audience to court (there was clearly a community desire for more and better business news), settling on a well-defined mission, reiterating that mission over and over, hiring the two best reporters from our competitor to round out an already strong team, putting an experienced and committed editor in charge of the project, working hand-in-hand with other divisions to develop a business plan, and committing to a bold promotional plan with a creative and energetic agency.

We also did something very different for us in the promotion and marketing - I was the liaison to the ad agency, rather than someone in advertising or circulation marketing. In retrospect, that's probably why our campaign married content and promotion better than we've done before. Typically, the newsroom hasn't been very engaged in marketing strategy, and that was a mistake. Our publisher, Lou Heldman, made the decision to do it differently, and it paid dividends for us.



Part of the campaign was an electronic (LED) billboard, and what was cool was that the image and message changed each day. When the section launched, we went something like three weeks changing it every day to use the lede headline from that day's business section. The company that owns the billboard said we were really the first user who came along and took advantage of the ability to change the message frequently.


Q: What part has online played in these innovations?

A: Both sections had Web components. Even more so with Business Today, simply because it's more breaking-news focused. WichiTalk focused heavily on interactivity, particularly blogging. And our Web intelligence is growing with each new initiative. The Web aspect is much bigger and bolder with Business Today. Push email and is now up to about 1,800 opt-in subscribers, with 2 or 3 advertisers most days.


Q: As a newsroom leader, what advice would you have to others about leading an agenda of continual change?

A: Think creatively about who should be involved in your initiatives. From the first brainstorming meetings to choose our projects, nothing about this process has been the way "we've always done it." Absolutely nothing. And the people who took part weren't just the usual suspects. We looked for creative and engaged people all through the company. One of the awesome things about these projects was giving people a chance to try something new and big, and watching them succeed and grow. Success creates an incredible energy.

And it's important to be honest about what we learned in each successive initiative. It's important to debrief - and not in a finger-pointing way - and agree on what we'd do differently next time. Then do it. We got better from WichiTalk to Business Today, from Business Today to a niche health and fitness magazine/web site called Alive & Well. Each time we learn and improve at improving.


By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.