Daily Circulation: 118,877
Sunday Circulation: 132,489


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
Established an annual RBS survey.

Raised story count and adopted focus on harder news for news section fronts to deliver more local news to readers.

Recast our business section to be for and about business people, adding a business columnist, retraining staff on what makes a business story, connecting a new editor with business leaders and adding a new annual economic review section.

Added accuracy watch – errors are now corrected on the front page of the section in which they occurred.

In paper promotion: news produces promos for today's and tomorrow's content every day.

Brand
Surveyed the market using the RI survey

Refocused our promotion to capitalize on readers' identification with our depth of experience and familiarity with the market.

Service
We combined circ and classified phone boards to provide greater consistency in our contacts with the public.

We outsourced after hours classified calls to a service bureau.

We outsourced start and renewal verification service to a computerized call center.

Culture
Increased the number of contacts and communication between senior management team and all departments in person, via newsletter and email to reinforce the fact that we all are working together.

Offered company wide briefings on our biannual market survey.



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 significant move for us last year from a revenue standpoint - and hopefully from a readership standpoint - was the launch of our Weekend Plus program. We now deliver our Wednesday paper to weekend subscribers instead of our TMC. We're selling more inserts as a result, we get credit for ABC for a weekday paper and weekenders get a reminder that they really should be subscribing every day...



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Circulation declines have slowed this year both daily and Sunday. Anecdotally, readers call and tell us there's more to read and they like it.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
Loyalty and commitment is something fewer and fewer readers feel toward us because of the vast number of alternatives they have and their apparently ever-decreasing attention span. A national ban on remote controls and the internet might stem this urge we have to change the channel or pick up a new free publication every 10 seconds...



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 revamp our consumer messaging sufficiently to reflect our brand strengths because of budget reductions. The down market has forced us to delay multi-media campaign development so we're moving very incrementally on the consumer advertising front.

Getting Traction on Readership

Survey Responses by Topic & Newspaper