Readership Institute: The Saginaw News

Daily Circulation: 47,100
Sunday Circulation: 57,711

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
Saturday WEEKend A 1. Our TV Magazine has traditionally helped drive single copy circulation on Saturdays. As on-screen alternatives to our still popular TV book gradually robbed sales, we've dressed up our cover to make it pop at newsstands and in the stores.

Weekend Wallet. You're sitting there Saturday morning with your Saginaw News. What money matters are on your mind now that it's finally the weekend? Getting the snowblower ready? Doing the fall fertilizing? Fixing that annoying bathroom faucet drip? That's what our editors are trying to picture as they assign stories for this new section, part of a front to back redesign.

Weekend Blitz (or Slam or Spring Sports, depending on the season) high school sports Saturday wrap-up. The conflict: High school sports are our bread and butter. But college and pro sports probably have broader following. They fight each other on the section front. Our solution? Focus the front on big time athletics and turn the back page of the Saturday section into "Page One" for preps.

Weekend Rap. Just three weeks ago, we started a sports "editorial page" for the back page of the Saturday paper during the months when high school athletics is in remission. When football cranks up in the autumn, we'll move it to Sunday.

The "rails." Designed to always change, always offer surprises. Heavy on reader participation. The Gallery, for example, has asked readers to share wedding disaster stories, funny things their children have said, household tips and so on. Metro "In search of" has led quests for the best DJ's (we rode that one to tons of free air time as the stations promoted votes for their talent), the ugliest car, regular people who look like celebrities (we run the pictures and some of them actually do). The Two Minute News strives to stay graphic and root out the most interesting and readable to get readers inside the paper.

The employment graphic. We're a p.m. paper with early deadlines. Radio and TV always beat us with the hard news about employment rates in our General Motors, job-obsessed town. So we give readers details next day in easy-to-absorb form.

Weekend activities. You have to understand our community character to see why we would put this on a hard news page. Traditionally, you worked here for good pay on an assembly line doing fairly boring work while daydreaming about how you were going to spend your weekend free time. The way people make their livings has changed; the culture hasn't caught up. We run this every Thursday (by Friday thousands of folks already have headed north to boat, camp, snowmobile or ski) and cross-refer to our HOT Ticket weekend entertainment section. Many weeks we also tease both with an A 1 photo or story on something going on during the weekend. When we reworked our Saturday paper, we added Weekend Activities to page A3.

On Course. Golf has reached mania status in Michigan. Expensive resort courses and mom and pop links are popping up everywhere in what has to be approaching an overdeveloped market. But tee times remain difficult to find. So we do double-truck, color golf pages during the season: a sports editor's column, course profile, features, tips, holes in one, the latest from the pro tour and your funny golf stories (send it in and win an On Course golf shirt if we use it — I have one, they are pretty cool). With Tee Times, we found out a good way to get charity outings and other events in the paper.

HELP. Goes with our "The Saginaw News Helping You" slogan, repeated amply on the flag, in every house ad, promo and note from the editor. One of our surveys indicated that "at risk" readers are fans of self-help columns. We decided to flood the paper with them. This short-bites, easy-to-consume Q&A format runs every Friday. Like the rails, it is always changing, depending on which of the guest experts has the most readable, helpful information. The syndicates were surprisingly accommodating about rates I was able to do it without added cost by cutting features in other parts of the paper. My favorite--advice with an attitude for the 20's and 30's demo. Directions to the feature editor: If any one of these get stale, dump it and get something else. We want it always changing and surprising.

Your Daily HELP. When Ann Landers died, we expanded on the Friday section theme by stretching the advice with attitude column (written only three times a week) out to offer a question/answer or two daily and picked up Dear Annie, to go with it.

Academic Dream Team and Terrific Teens/Spin. What editor isn't tired of hearing it: "The athletes get all the attention." So every year, we do our best students dream team section, give it good play on A1 and time it to go out with our Newspaper in Education package. Terrific Teen useful for bundling up and mailing to readers who write to complain about how we only report about the bad kids, why don't you ever write about the good things young people do" runs weekly on Wednesday's SpiN. SpiN plays off our brand-ID SN flag, in case you didn't notice. (I included samples of our dream team graphics. Our sports staff does it for every major boys and girls sport.)

A portrait of Saginaw County: A look at your neighborhood. 54 consecutive 2000 Census tract packages on every neighborhood in our county. Readers can compare their situations to that of their neighbors for 1990 and 2000, then see how they match up with the county as a whole for the two every-10-years counts.

Animal House--featured creatures. Our love affair with our pets.

Rural Life--Our most recent survey showed strong readership across the dimensions of our constituency: Urban, suburban, black white, men, women. The least locked in, though, was rural readership at just 65 percent on Sunday, 52 percent daily. We have a multiple-part plan for doing better, one of which is our rural life page. We introduced it in March this year.

Brand
Our strategic planning branding team continues to work on this.

The Saginaw News: Helping You Every Day - A consistent, persistent, ubiquitous theme that ties together all of our promotion in editorial, circulation, advertising and marketing. It's on our name badges, in our radio commercials and is part of our television convergence messages. It permeates our content, voice and branding.

"Emotional branding" in-paper ads - touchy, feely quarter-page ads about our people and our content.

Special events:

Crystal Apple Award - Youngsters nominate their teachers to receive the undisputed most important teacher award in our market at an emotional evening banquet.

Community Excellence Awards - Readers nominate active, engaged high school students not necessarily the geniuses but those who have outstanding records of volunteer service. They win scholarship money and a handsome lighted world globe.

Shiver on the River ice fishing contest - The Saginaw River, once so polluted it wouldn't freeze now is one of the premier walleye pike fisheries in the Midwest. The January contest draws hundreds of participants from our circulation area and beyond for ice fishing, a techniques lecture and prizes.

Friday Night Live Rids Night - Thousands of folks gather in a downtown park for themed concerts six Friday nights every summer. The Saginaw News sponsors, promotes, organizes and enjoys the evening set aside for children.

Great Saginaw River Free Fishing Fun Day - a summer weekend event for children 3 to 15.

Saginaw County Spelling Bee - Youngsters learn to spell words many of us never heard of in exchange for a chance to go to Washington, D.C., to spell even more difficult words most of us have never heard of.

Season Readings - a holiday book collection effort that last year distributed 10,000 books to needy boys and girls.

Help Stuff a Back Pack - a joint venture of The Saginaw News and several advertisers that collected funds to fill 430 backpacks with school supplies for needy children in 2002.

Saginaw News Cookie House competition readers, in various categories, create elaborate Christmas gingerbread houses for fun and prizes.

Service:
We have:

Added payment by credit card.

Introduced office collect.

Set up circulation kiosk service at major retailers, sporting events and entertainment venues.

Provided phone courtesy and service training for every department. Note the phone message slips that also serve as reminders of the importance of phone encounters to making a good impression on customers.

Reworked the on hold phone messages to better explain various newspaper services.

Instituted "Tell it to the News Night," during which representatives of the paper take phone calls from readers.

Began reader, advertiser and carrier forums in zip codes throughout our circulation area.

Culture
The Saginaw News, since the early 1980s, has nurtured a culture of cross fertilization and cooperation among the news, advertising, circulation, production and marketing departments. But we continue to refine our relationships.

The most recent cover-to-cover remake of the paper included representatives of all departments on the editor's design team.

In 2000, we established a marketing group that includes representatives of many of the newspapers departments.

Editorial has a history of collaboration and cooperation with the advertising department. One example: The sports editor wanted to create new golf pages. To help pay for the project, he worked with the ad director to identify potential advertisers and ways to approach them.

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?
Our attitude, as manifest in the "rails" philosophy. We need to give our readers more delightful surprises, more unexpected fun, more things they wanted to find but didn't know they wanted to find them. We focus on solutions reporting in ways big and small. It helps that our newspaper has a "voice." We're your neighbor. When we edit our paper, we try to inject that feeling in what we do, how we do it and the tone we take in addressing our readers in print, on the phone and in our community service. We are just like our readers. What makes us different is that we have the aptitude and training (and it's our job) to keep them posted on everything worth knowing in our towns.

What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Overall weekday "yesterday" readership increased from 53 percent daily in 2000 to 59 percent in 2002. Sunday readership stayed roughly steady between 70 percent and 74 percent in four measurements. (CMB 2002)

Sunday readership by demographic: Men, 70 percent; women 73 percent; white, 71 percent; black 72 percent; urban 73 percent; suburban, 75 percent; rural 65 percent. (We're working on our rural numbers.) (CMB 2002)

"Saginaw County readers have a high level of interest in most topics measured, particularly highly local topics. Satisfaction with The Saginaw News coverage of these topics is strong with excellent/good ratings averaging in the high 70 percent range." (CMB 2002)

Nevertheless, our circulation continues its decade long slide: In June 1993 our daily circulation was 56,665, 66,089 Sunday. In June 2003, daily circulation was 45,963; Sunday, 57, 249.

What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
We have to take chances with content presentation. We have to pull out all the stops in making the paper easy to read. That means using all our tools and matching them with the content. We should never describe geography with text, that's the jobs of a map. We should never try to deal with complex numerical relationships in text, that's the job of a graph. We should show people with our writing, not tell them. It's OK to describe a scene, but a photo quite often does it better. We have to respect our readers' time and make it easy for them to consume our paper.

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?
Develop a sophisticated marketing plan that meshes just right with our circulation area, then pound it home until it sticks that you can't make it through a day without our paper. We made some noble stabs at marketing but just haven't been smart enough yet to figure out how to do it just right.

Add a quick read page--a 10-minute Saginaw News that's a true abstract of the best of every part of the paper to hit the "don't have enough time to read" excuse head on. Such a thing, as we envision it, is labor and space intensive and that's holding us up.