Daily Circulation: 29,909
Sunday Circulation: 34,152


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
We've completed an editorial re-design adding several new local columnists both from our staff and outside as well as new section fronts, features, and increased our page count thus a larger news hole.

Brand
In the process of the re-design, we modernized our look, instituted a color flag, and have increased our promotional efforts within the newspaper.

Service
We've implemented telemarketing for the first time ever here, just in time for a national no-call list. We've shortened routes in order to deliver to the home by 6 a.m. daily.

Culture
Our writers are beginning to work smarter. We'll be looking at agendas of meetings, interviewing the principals prior to the meeting and writing the story before the meeting takes place. We'll have our people sitting in meetings for less time thus allowing them to cover more local items of interest.



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?
Having just been here a year since our new ownership took over, most of our moves have been to position ourselves internally through reorganization. We've also eliminated our printing on an antiquated letterpress and are now printed on offset. Regarding anything successful and innovative, I can only state that strong leadership in our news room from a new managing editor has the entire staff pointed in the right direction. The staff was "wondering" and now they have direction and purpose.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
The community continues to comment favorably about the changes we've made. Our culture of more local news has definitely made a huge impact. Our local story count is over 400% more than a year ago and the community likes that very much. Single copy sales have begun to climb as well.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
That readers don't respond as quickly as I had thought. They're creatures of habit and don't always like a lot of the changes we've thrown at them. I had thought that a more progressive approach to our whole purpose would create a much faster increase in sales.



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?
I'd like to offer a paid newspaper online. We're looking at software now but this would certainly increase our readership and return some revenues to the newspaper.

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