Daily Circulation: 68,867
Sunday Circulation: 96,506

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
Dramatically increased use of in-paper promotion, especially what's coming tomorrow and next week.

Brand
We spent years branding our Web site differently from newspaper using the portal strategy. We are abandoning that and have spent months visioning a new branding campaign. More than 50 employees from all departments recently went out into the community asking about perceptions of the newspaper.

Service
Publisher and editor are calling readers each day to discuss service issues.

Culture
We are restructuring all meetings to dig down into the first level of management, those folks in the trenches doing the heavy-lifting every day.



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?
Begin with zero-based strategic planning. Convince yourself that what you have done for 30 years is in the past. While it is institutional knowledge, it is not necessarily a roadmap to what needs to be done in the future.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
High penetration in zips that were targeted for content and service.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
News is a commodity, so people need to think of the newspaper as a partner is many facets of their lives.



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?
Convene a rather large focus group and then stick with that focus group through about three years of changes. See if changes are really noticed and to what extent. Not sure when to start and not sure of the commitment.

Getting Traction on Readership

Survey Responses by Topic & Newspaper