Daily Circulation: 183,288
Sunday Circulation: 233,608


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
Emphasize content. We have looked for innovative ways to tell stories — from new, brief story forms to one major 16-page special section titled "Chasing Hope" on the life of burn victim, Jacqueline Saburido.

Promote content.

Cross promotions. Last year we began a much more vigorous effort to tease to stories from Page 1 as well as our online site, Statesman.com. Likewise, Statesman.com teases aggressively to the print edition.

In-house promotion. As a result of the Readership Survey and other research, our promotions department created a campaign of ads to: 1)Promote the improvements of our 2002 redesign (more easily navigated, better packaging); 2)Promote the content of the paper, section by section; and 3)Promote the three choices for news distribution — print, online or our electronic edition. Promoting our strengths in print — that was the goal, along with greatly increasing online promotion.

Brand
Redesign of logo; more elegant, restored to historically accurate type face.

Metro, page 2 now has a standing box to promote editorial content or newspaper-sponsored events.

Service
Improved home delivery service:

Poor Service stops (canceling subscription) cannot be prevented without a personal contact; we work to save the customer. This has resulted in huge paybacks.

Double bagging newspapers for rainy days is mandatory. Single bagging for 30% or better chance of rain. Again, this has brought huge improvements.

Restructured and transferred seasoned, strong area managers into our difficult branches.

Training programs on contracting are independent contractors to improve retention. We have begun to replace carriers who have service issues.

We conduct service surveys every quarter to six months to determine if our service is good — proactive rather than reactive.

Improved delivery time for the Williamson County edition (important growth area to the north of Austin)

More verification of service starts, vacation starts, resulting in customer satisfaction

Also, as a company-wide training effort, we just participated in a pilot newspaper-designed customer service training program at the Waco Tribune, our sister paper, lead by our corporate human resource director on the functions of solid customer service.

Better serving the needs of advertisers:

Developed a training booklet and program for internal and external clients.

The idea was that for advertising to help increase readership, the ads should be designed as well as possible. The majority of ads are produced for small business clients who control the ad approval. We assumed that these small business owners were knowledgeable about their business but may not have had any training in advertising design. We wanted to produce a tool to help educate them on the basics of good ad design. This lead to creation and printing of "Eight keys to effective advertising". This booklet serves as the core material for the "Effective Advertising Workshop."

It seemed to make sense to make sure our internal staff was exposed to the basics of ad design before we took the message to our clients. We began by having all internal sales people, sales assistants and ad builders go through the workshop. We also told the sales staff why we where doing this training and asked them to talk with their customers who they felt might benefit about attending a future workshop. We also offered to take the workshop on the road to any business related group that might wish to have us on their agenda.

We inserted reply cards into every bill we sent out asking our customers to let us know if they would be interested in attending an "Effective Advertising Workshop". We also asked them about two other workshops — one dealing with writing ad headlines and the other covering the basics of online advertising.

We received 40+ positive replies and are currently planning a workshop for these external advertisers in the near future.

Culture
A "Culture Club" committee with representatives from each department analyzed the data gathered for the readership study and made recommendations to the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee developed a statement that demonstrates the company's commitment to a constructive culture.

Our company, Cox Enterprises Inc., has shown its commitment to management development by creating and funding the Leadership Fundamentals program designed to effectively communicate the company's position regarding a constructive management style and diversity. As of this date, 58% of the Statesman's 236 managers and supervisors have been through the two-day program and all will be trained by the end of the year.

Newsroom Training. The newsroom has developed an extremely successful training program that has empowered staff to take an active role in their own on going education. The assistant managing editor invites newsroom staff to participate in a committee that seeks outside trainers in all fields. They make arrangements and schedule everything from informal brown-bag lunches to workshops to individual coaching. The committee has a substantial budget to cover expenses — a budget that has increased throughout the last several years, even as the economy has tightened. This has helped improve skills and morale — positive cultural change that ultimately translates into improved product.

And in the effort to improve communication, these changes were made that positively impact the culture of our business: Improved "community board" located in common area to share info; the internal phone directory is now updated and published every six months; Statesman Note, an in-house newsletter, is produced and distributed weekly; a quarterly managers’ meeting now pulls business-wide leaders together for sharing of information including the CFO's financial report.



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?
Investing in staff helps retain good people, attract good people and translates into good work readers appreciate. (see the description of our innovative newsroom training program in the "culture" segment above)

Improved communication between news, promotions and circulation departments helps.

Comprehensive and thoughtful promotion of content helps.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Producing a certain kind of local news (as the Readership Institute Survey suggested) showed results. "Chasing Hope," published in print in May, 2002 is still published on our online site where it has received more than five million views. Mothers Against Drunk Driving contracted with us to print 400,000 additional copies for distribution to students.

As we have dedicated more resources to our online efforts, Statesman.com, and made a daily commitment to promoting it from every day's newspaper in a thoughtful way, we have seen dramatic increases in readership.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
Urban & Associates conducted a strategic readership study for us in the fall of 2002. What we see put simply is the decline of print readership is offset by the increase in readership of our online product, Statesman.com. Referred to as the extended reach of the American-Statesman (print plus web), we see a promising clue that we are continuing to reach readers.

From the Urban & Associates survey (Fall 2002):

Most of the AA-S website visitors also read the American-Statesman. Just 9% of the adults in the market use the AA-S websites exclusively. However, the exclusive website audience has grown substantially since 2000, when it represented just 3% of the market. The net effect of the larger AA-S web audience is that the AA-S 7-day print/online extended coverage essentially matches the mark set in 2000.

The AA-S online audience (particularly those who use the websites exclusive of the paper) skews younger, higher educated, white collar, and they're newer to the Austin area. It's a complementary audience.

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 manage our resources carefully and strive to improve daily. If one thing prevents us from doing more, it is possibly the sluggish economy; the same reality we all face. We are fortunate to be in a growing market, in a vibrant community with well educated, demanding readers. As the better economic times return, we will be poised to grow along with our market.

Getting Traction on Readership

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