(Steve Duke)

Monday was the big day for the Chicago Tribune, the day the paper rolled out its much-anticipated new design. Others are critiquing that effort (here and here, for example). I want to share an anecdote about a different aspect of the roll-out.

Unveiling and selling a new design takes a big push, and the Trib bent itself to the effort. There were advance stories wedged into the "news report" on Tribune Co.-owned WGN-TV, video on the Web, appearances on TV by company executives, and on Monday hawkers handed out copies at mass transit stations.

I don't subscribe (more on that in a moment), so I headed out from my campus office to get a copy. I wanted to see it, and wanted to get reaction from my journalism students, especially since the new design seems aimed at a younger reader.

Easy mission? Not quite.

No free copies where I sometimes find them in racks in one of the journalism buildings, so clutching 75 cents I headed for the vending machine in the other j-building. It hadn't been filled.

Undaunted, I strolled across campus to the busy intersection at the entrance to our university where I knew there was a gaggle of vending machines. Empty again. I'd already walked farther than any normal reader would, but this had become a challenge, so I marched from corner to corner until I was in central downtown Evanston before finding a stocked box outside a restaurant.

Let's give the Trib the benefit of the doubt. It was after 9 a.m. when I started my hunt. Maybe the paper was such a hit, the boxes sold out by then (although I didn't witness hordes of people with their noses buried in newspapers). I discovered the real tragedy of the marketing effort on my way back to my office. At the archway that marks the southwestern entrance to campus, dumped obscurely against one of the supporting columns were four or five bundles of Tribunes, still bound with plastic bands. Intended for boxes? Or free distribution? Who knows, as they languished unheeded off the side of the path.

I'm not picking on the Trib, rather this tale illuminates a broader issue for newspapers: intense concentration on shaping the content to be more appealing to readers, while paying far less attention to equally important business-side issues like service and brand.

We've been vigorous proponents of improving content to better reach readers from our original Impact study in 2000 right through to our ground-breaking experience research. But we've also said right from the beginning that just improving content isn't enough. There must be equally muscular development of culture, brand and service.

The Trib's roll-out day miscue was a service issue that also reflected on the brand. That monumental effort put into creating the content, packaging and design was undone in some quarters by failure to follow through with the same kind of attention to service. Does this story resonate with you? Have you driven service improvement as much as you have content improvement?

So why did I have to take the hike, why don't I just subscribe? Again, as I unwind this personal tale, ask yourself if this happens at your place.

I'd been a loyal, pay-in-advance, seven-day subscriber of the Tribune for years. During that time I had struggled with the circulation service, most annoyingly the inability to get correct credits for vacation stops. Finally, after several particularly frustrating months of calls to the paper, I decided the way to get their attention was to stop paying.

Eventually I got a call asking me about my failure to pay. I responded that I had decided to let the subscription lapse. To my surprise, the CSR did not ask me why, didn't ask if there was anything wrong, didn't ask if there was something he could do to change my mind. He simply said, "OK, I'll make a note of that."

Of course, the paper didn't stop immediately. It landed on my lawn every day for another two or three weeks. When it finally stopped, I was disappointed that the Trib had taken so little interest in me as a reader after all those years, and thought that was the end of the matter.

I was wrong. About a month later I did receive a followup letter – from a collection agency seeking payment for those last papers. The Trib was swifter with the referral to a collection agency than it ever was in resolving my service complaints.

Again, this is not to vent my personal frustrations with the Trib. It just happens to be my local example. In the roughly two years since that cancellation I've heard similar stories of lapsed service from employees of almost every newspaper that has sent people to our workshops and seminars. As a colleague of mine often says when hearing these examples, service seems to be an industry learning disability.

This isn't meant to take any of the pressure off journalists to improve content and engage readers. However, if newspapers don't set an equally high bar for service and brand management, the content-improvement work will be in vain.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.