Daily Circulation: 7,447
Sunday Circulation: 7,447


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
Expanding coverage area to include more county news

Running photos of ordinary people doing ordinary things

Conducting more “Man on the Street” interviews

Increasing number of opinion pages from two to about six or seven per week

Creating more specialty pages in the daily product directed at targeted reader groups

Developing and designing more monthly, quarterly and annual special sections targeting specific reader groups and highlighting specific events

Brand
Improving and updating page design throughout the daily product, as well as throughout all special sections

Expanding coverage to better represent the county as a whole, instead of the paper's hometown only

Using of staff (i.e. publisher and editor) to spread the name of the newspaper through community and civic involvement

Having the newspaper sponsor or co-sponsor events throughout the community

Service
Implementing a sampling program to help gain reader interest and grow circulation

Implementing customer retention program

Implementing quarterly mass distributions throughout county

Holding weekly circulation meetings to help departments better understand needs of the customers

Holding monthly carrier meetings

Circulation department working with community and civic organizations

Culture
Holding weekly production meetings at central location of cluster group

Holding weekly managers meeting at each location within the cluster group

Implementing weekly editorial meeting for cluster group to work on shared content and special section ideas

Encouraging carriers to provide better customer service by awarding carriers for outstanding service. This includes honoring a carrier of the month and the year, published in the newspaper



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?
We have worked hard on becoming as local and community oriented as possible with our coverage. In doing so, we have received great feedback from our customers. We leave the Associated Press coverage to the larger metropolitan newspapers. Instead of attempting to run the same state or nation issue as a larger paper, we take the same issue, whether it be the war in Iraq or West Nile Virus, and localize it in some way to fit our community.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
We have received numerous phone calls and messages from individuals and businesses throughout the county wanting the Times-Review to expand its coverage into his/her/its respective area. Positive comments, such as the Times-Review looks like a real newspaper now, have inspired some former subscribers to subscribe once again.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
To become as involved in the community as possible. By becoming part of the community, you instantly gain respect as a newspaper that cares. We've received many accolades and story ideas from individuals just calling the office because they met one of our reporters or because they know us due to an affiliation in a community or civic organization.



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 would like to work more diligently on developing and designing more specialty pages. In order to do so, we need to gain advertising sponsors to help make increasing page counts feasible. With a harsh economy the past couple of years, it has been a little more difficult to do that.

Getting Traction on Readership

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