Daily Circulation: 232,652
Sunday Circulation: 434,023


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
Added several regular features with heightened local and ordinary people news.

Snapshots, anchored photo and article on ordinary local person.

Takes Five, anchored daily Q&A.

Weekly food column by prominent local chef.

Weekly question to feature section readers.

Road Warrior column on how local roads and road issues impact our lives and travels.

Increased obits and prominence.

Increased same day and upcoming editorial content promotion.

Increased signposts, prompts and refers.

Developed advertising content promotion pieces to reinforce the newspaper's position as the marketplace.

Brand
Invested in brand discovery process.

Developing internal and external brand communication campaigns.

Promote the strength, expertise and market position of our products and people.

Service
Continue to perform below industry standard complaint levels.

Culture
Developed survey to identify problem areas.

Administered to managers at special department meetings.



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?
Recognizing that readership leads to revenue through advertising and circulation, we built our strategic focus around the four cornerstones of readership. Top level executives clearly and consistently communicate the plan and our readership focus. This is a consistent theme and we walk the talk as well as talk the talk.

Understanding that our major challenge is to increase RBS among young, light readers, we focus our strategic efforts on that important target group. We measure and track the perception and behavior of this group compared to other segments.

We worked to understand and leverage advertising as a readership driver, which is especially strong in our market. We conducted a follow-up study and measured the opportunity to grow readership by categories of advertising. This study showed us which advertising categories have the potential to grow readership among our target reader groups.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
We are proud that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel continues to outperform the industry as well as the large circulation newspaper group in RBS.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. It takes a lot of effort to get a company educated and focused on a goal. The communication aspect is a never ending process, not a task. We strive to find new ways to keep talking about readership, to keep it top-of-mind and on the front burner.

We learned we are too modest and are becoming better at self-promotion. The market does not know what we do unless we tell them, so we strive to tell them all the things we do, i.e., break most of the news, contend for and win awards, represent our locality through reporters on assignment, have topical experts to inform and respond to questions, investigate local issues.



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've done some advertising content promotion, but need to do a lot more of this on a regular basis. While we do a better job with editorial content promotion and it is done consistently, we are not yet providing the needed support. We know that classified advertising and advertising inserts are major entry points among young light readers, we are not yet promoting editorial content in these areas of the newspaper. Data shows that our largest opportunity element in RBS is frequency of reading. We need to tell the young light readers in the classifieds that there is an article of relevance to them in another section of that newspaper and that an upcoming day's edition will have a story that interests them.

To date, production limitations have kept us from implementing editorial content promotion in the classified section. Promoting content through inserts would be added expense and is not feasible unless we partner with an advertiser, perhaps by sharing a single sheet insert and using one side each.

Getting Traction on Readership

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