Daily Circulation: 56,599
Sunday Circulation: 70,137


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.

Service
Telephone skills seminar for staff and general public

Established benchmarks for acceptable dropped call ratios and talk time for each agent in classified

Start verification program for circulation

Increased interactive presence for circulation activity

Print quality-grading program to improve reproduction quality and reduce adjustments

Commercial Customer Feedback Program and Customer Care representative for commercial printing jobs

Content/News
Increased community news event coverage

Embedded war coverage, Hometown Heroes

Daily business coverage

Special emphasis on golf coverage, due to four area tournaments

West Chatham/Effingham Closeup split

Increased local news content from an average of 23 local stories/day in the first quarter to 26 a day in April and May

Content/Advertising
Style Page – a full page, full color broadsheet page published twice a month

Color By The Inch – a program to increase color in small space ads

Healthy Advice from the Pro's – an advertorial environment for area medical professionals to capitalize on high interest in our area for health related topics

Starting Out/Starting Over – banner ad page directed to entry level positions paying less than $10 per hour.

Classified Section – at long last, we began publishing a stand alone classified section

Paid Obituaries – Generates very interesting, very local, very colorful content

Brand
Content promotion – Designed to increase awareness of our ease of navigation, standing content, and upcoming content. Features our newspaper mascot/icon, Reed Daily, the newspaper Dalmatian

Content promotion to specific target demographics, e.g. upcoming daily features with appeal to women are promoted on Sunday (a high readership day for women in our market) to increase awareness and readership

Culture
Purchase of a popcorn machine and institution of Popcorn Fridays, held monthly throughout the building

Core values development and establishment of practices to keep those values in every employee's mind

Employee survey to benchmark employee perceptions about the workplace, and a second to survey to measure our improvements

New orientation program and period

Training survey – to solicit employee input into the training opportunities offered at the newspaper

Increased communication opportunities – continue to fine-tune the Bay Window, establish a computer kiosk where employees without a PC workstation could access company information (i.e. insurance, e-mail, intranet, etc.)



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 most innovative thing we've done is to purchase a popcorn machine and instituted "Popcorn Fridays" once a month. A different department "hosts" the event each month and employees are invited to stop by for free popcorn. The most successful thing we've done is to promote upcoming daily feature coverage to the high readership of women in the Sunday paper. We also increased the promotion of upcoming feature coverage in our TMC products. The most noteworthy thing we have done is the work on our core values. When employees are more satisfied with their work, when they feel better about the work they do, they will do a better job of satisfying customer needs, thereby boosting readership and profitability.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
The most persuasive indicator that our readership efforts are producing results is the response from our advertisers. For example, our efforts to improve advertising content in the paper might have brought positive response initially, but if we failed to deliver results, the interest would have been short-lived. Our continued success is the best indicator that we are moving in the right direction, creating advertising content that drives RBS.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
The most important lesson on readership we've learned in the last four years is how challenging it is to respond to the changing market and demands of new media. Our goal is to become more nimble in reporting for both the web and print. This will require some structural changes, as well as additional culture change.



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 have not been able to show demonstrable increase in readership among youth markets (18-35 year olds) and females, 25-40, with children. Why this hasn't been done is due to a series of factors, which we are attempting to address with actions designed to attract those readers, such as expanded entertainment coverage, "weekend warrior" project type coverage, and the like. In addition, we have not been as successful pushing the readership institute initiatives downward through the organization as we would like.

Getting Traction on Readership

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