Daily Circulation: 460, 672
Sunday Circulation: 620,782


List the major steps you have taken in the last four years to increase readership. Please organize your response under four headings: content, brand, service, culture.

Content
Conducted first Readership/Content Study since the mid-90s. The results of this study, returned to us early this year, provide a benchmark to measure future progress. We now have a clear indication of which content areas are strengths for us and where we are weak. We also have a better sense of where we can have the most impact with readers and are using this information to help set content development priorities.

Launched daily @Issue, three pages of daily opinion, op-ed and opposing viewpoints. We made this change last year and received overwhelmingly favorable reader response. The pages are more reader interactive and work hard to bring varying viewpoints to an issue.

Launched Atlanta & the World, a stand-alone Wednesday section focusing on metro Atlanta's growing international flavor and its business, political and cultural ties around the globe. The section began a year and a half ago and already scored well in the Readership Study mentioned above.

Launched AccessAtlanta and Movies & More, our new Thursday-Friday entertainment section lineup, in April of this year. This new combination replaced our Friday, broadsheet Weekend Preview section, whose readership was aging and beginning to slip. AccessAtlanta (tab, Thursday) is aimed at a 25-39 year-old audience, a segment that in large part was not reading Weekend Preview. Movies & More (broadsheet, Friday) is directed at a more general audience and allows us to emphasize movies to an event greater extent.

AccessAtlanta.com was re-launched in tandem with the new print sections as an all-entertainment, all-the-time source for the best things to do in metro Atlanta. The site includes extensive event and dining databases.

Redesigned 1A and section front teases earlier this year to put more emphasis on the most interesting, unexpected or reader oriented content rather than simply the most important news that didn't make the front page. We emphasized the importance of good, compelling writing in these teases and have actually gotten reader e-mails complimenting the wordsmithing. Our section front teases also carry daily references to online content.

Greater emphasis on local obits and the creation this year of searchable online obituaries and online tribute/memorial pages through partnership with legacy.com. The recent death of former Mayor Maynard Jackson proved the power of these online tributes — we received thousands of postings.

Redefining our Sunday lifestyle section. This section has evolved from Dixie Living, focusing on Southern news and culture to Sunday Living, a more general interest section containing fashion, relationship advice, food, lifestyle and hobbies. The conversion was gradual since 1996 and finished with a redesign and re-launch last year. The updated design and content have paid off, readership of that section is up 7 percent overall since '96 and nearly 10 percent in the last two years.

Emphasis on high school sports. An effort begun last year in our Sports department with the reallocation of manpower and space to better cover this topic continues today with our most aggressive planning yet for tackling the fall football season. Anecdotally, reader feedback has been very positive. We also had an uptick in Sunday Bulldog sales last year with the inclusion of beefed-up high school football pages.

Brand
Print-online brand integration. Over the last two years, we have made great strides in uniting our print and online brands to position the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a 24 hour news and information source. Our message to consumers is that we have what you are looking for in whatever medium suits you best. Our marketing campaigns emphasize the relationship between print and online and the two platforms work hard to promote content back and forth.

The best recent example of this integration was the simultaneous launch of AccessAtlanta, our weekly print entertainment guide, and accessAtlanta.com, recreated as an all-entertainment Web site. The two were developed and launched together to complement each other. For the consumer, there are reasons to use both — from the portability of the tab section to the event search functionality of the Web site. All they have to remember is AccessAtlanta = entertainment.

Brand representation standards. Over the last three years, our Marketing department has made a strong, concerted effort to define how and when our brand should be represented. This ranges from event signage, to single-copy racks, to promotional and advertising use, to letterhead and even business cards. We still have work to do, but we now have clear guidelines for how our title and the titles of our sections and online products should be used.

Improved content promotion. The frequency of house ads promoting upcoming content has grown significantly in the last two years. Perhaps even more important, however, is the more strategic thought going into the design of these ads and their placement within the paper. Content promotions no longer go wherever they fit most easily in the layout of the paper. They now are designated for sections whose readership is most likely to identify with the content of the promotion.

Service
Evolving role of the Public Editor. We have had a Public Editor for about four years, but this position has particularly come into its own in the last two years. By making a senior editor the public face and name responsible for maintaining a constant dialog with readers, we have grown more aware of our readers' sensibilities and interests. We have become more responsive to reader questions and more accessible. Our Public Editor's weekly column (Saturdays) gives readers a look inside the news gathering and news reporting process. He offers warts-and-all discussions of why we do the things we do in our news columns and we believe this openness helps build trust and loyalty.

Free rack distribution for AccessAtlanta. Because we knew that many of the people we are trying to reach with our new entertainment section, AccessAtlanta, are not current readers and would not find the section on their own, we decided to make the section more available to them. We began in April distributing 5,000 copies a week free in special racks in high-traffic entertainment zones in the city. The exposure has helped give the section and its advertisers much needed exposure. We are exploring an expansion of this program.

Educational campaign and staff restructuring to improve handling of incoming phone calls. Last year, we trained or retrained our clerks, administrative assistants and customer service representatives to better handle incoming reader calls. We updated staff lists and section/departmental descriptions to help better direct callers. And we reemphasized with all employees the importance of responding to reader calls.

Culture
Innovation, research and development is a constant. We have developed a culture at the AJC that encourages innovation. We like to try new things and we're getting better and more sophisticated in how we do this. The launches of many of the sections mentioned in the Content portion of this memo are evidence of this emphasis on product development. It is especially gratifying to have maintained this emphasis during a down market. While many news organizations hunker down, looking only to cut costs, it is clear here that we expect innovation to continue despite financial challenges. In fact, it is during these times that forward-thinking product development is most crucial. We expect our employees and our paper to be poised and ready to take greatest advantage when the economy turns around — we will be positioned to do that only if we maintain a constant emphasis on improvement and growth.



What is the most innovative, successful or noteworthy thing you have done on readership that you think other papers might learn from or want to emulate?
As mentioned above, this launch was readership driven from the outset. Our previous entertainment section was doing fine financially, but readership was eroding. The audience was aging with the readership of the paper as a whole and we were not drawing new, younger readers. To figure out how to address this problem, we developed and remained committed to a research plan that included qualitative and quantitative studies and called for consumer feedback through formal and informal focus groups throughout the development process. Since the launch, we have continued this quest for reader feedback by holding follow-up focus groups to see if our content was hitting the mark and have planned a follow-up telephone survey to measure readership of, and satisfaction with, our entertainment coverage.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Our readership, in absolute numbers, is increasing. We have a growing market and the number of people reading the AJC is rising.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
Addressing readership issues is a constant need and must be a long-term commitment. To effectively address readership issues, you need good consumer research.



What would you like to do on readership that you have not been able to do and why haven't you been able to do it?
We'd like to still do better with the suburbs and trying to find a way to integrate them better into our daily operation. How can we connect better at a very local level? Is much depth in the suburbs achievable? etc. Also, should we be looking for partnerships with cable, radio, etc., where we can work together to help each other raise awareness.

Getting Traction on Readership

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