Daily Circulation: 96,221
Sunday Circulation: 80,192


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
Revamped lifestyle section to make it locally actionable and focused on themes that have high RBS impact - fashion, health, travel, food, family, weekend go and do information.

Redesigned the paper to make it easy to use. Right column A1 rail not only provides quick read on the news but helps readers navigate through the paper. Since local news is in the front part of the A section followed by nation/world news, the Tribune has an unfamiliar organization to many of the new people who moved into our communities. We also changed body and headline types, with readability being the leading criterion for selecting body type.

Under the ordinary people category, we launched:

A three times a week "Friends and Neighbors" column designed to showcase the stories and achievements of everyday people. (We don't like to call them ordinary people.)

A Connections page every Sunday aimed at recognizing and bringing together people who help those in need.

A "Success" feature on p2 of our Sunday business section where we profile a business person whose success can be instructive to others in business. This brought into the paper everyday business people whose names would rarely show up on a source or contact rolodex.

While keeping up with all four major league sports teams and a Pac-10 university athletic program, our sports staff moved high school sports into a higher priority, publishing Varsity Extra section on high school football Fridays. Prep sports is not a high readership topic, but it helps us establish closer ties to our community and brings youth images into the paper.

We redefined who we are and who we served in every section to keep our focus on the East Valley and not Phoenix.

We created an open page in our nation/world section that focused on helping readers understand the significance of a major national or international story. This was in response to a reader survey that showed we needed to balance our local report with a better national and world report.

We promote to future and inside stories off of section covers. And we've just begun a program to promote editorial content in space created by odd shaped ads or space that filler ads would previously have filled.

Brand
While surveys showed us as having a reputation for being a strong and caring local news provider, region's metro paper received higher marks as an intelligent and knowledgeable news source. We're working to change this with two marketing messages. One that notes we won the Arizona APME general excellence award for metro newspapers and the second that defines us as a newspaper that delivers both community news and nation/world news.

Until 3.5 years ago, our nameplate was simply The Tribune. We renamed ourselves the East Valley Tribune and our features section became East Valley Life to not only identify the geographical area we serve but also to connect us better the growing identification of the East Valley as a preferred place in which to live and work in the greater Phoenix area.

We're promoting between our publications and have created partnerships with two local television stations that give us a regular presence and marketing benefit that we cannot afford to buy.

The creation of a nation/world focus page was as much a move to strengthen our brand as a full-service, intelligent, experienced newspaper as it was a content enhancement.

We are working through our opinion pages and publisher's involvement in the community to establish the newspaper as a community leader.

Service
Editorial moved deadlines up and worked with production to create better page flow so that circulation could deliver most papers by 5:30 a.m.

Culture
In recent years, we've driven a major cultural shift in the newsroom away from the view that we are the Phoenix area's second and smaller metro newspaper. We focus with a passion on East Valley stories, venues, issues and editorially advocate for a better East Valley, particularly when it comes to resource distribution between our cities and Phoenix. (The East Valley is a cluster of five cities with a total population of more than 1.1 million.)

We have almost completed the process of identifying our core newsroom principles. Among them is a principle that defines how we should behave in encounters with our readers.

Being the underdog in a competitive market has led to the evolution of a different culture in our newsroom. There is a genuine recognition that for our newspaper to survive we must work as a team in the newsroom as well as with other departments in the building. That doesn't mean compromising our ethics, but it does mean working closely with advertising in giving birth, for instance, to a special sports section or a new Sunday Arts section.



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?
The cultural shift in defining our market, studying our market, interacting with our market and then reshaping the newspaper section by section, page by page to serve readers in the community with the thought of how we can make readers more successful in their own lives and better able to shape their community.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Latest Scarborough readership numbers show an annual readership growth of 18 percent in 2002 and our circulation has grown 3 percent. Meanwhile, our competition has declined in both readership and circulation.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
The most important thing I've learned is that there is no most important thing. There is no silver bullet. So here are three important things among many.

How important it is to develop a strategy that you can win at and execute on that strategy relentlessly. (May not apply to monopoly markets.)

How important inside sections and inside pages are. One of the biggest mistakes newspapers have made in recent decades is not realizing how important properly focused lifestyle, entertainment, and business sections are. Newspapers often don't have a clear idea what they're doing with these sections and how essential they are to the local news report. Lifestyle/Accent/Tempo - you name it - sections often confuse entertainment with lifestyle and think wire fills the bill.

When you start thinking about bettering readers' lives and the communities they live in, you think about the newspaper and edit the newspaper in a different way, and that doesn't mean sacrificing the enterprise and watchdog journalism that we know our readers want from us and expect us to provide.



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?
Establish readership metrics.

Cross promotion, because of space limitations, has been a real challenge.

Getting Traction on Readership

Survey Responses by Topic & Newspaper