Daily Circulation: 55,886
Sunday Circulation: 63,255


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
Launched a weekly home and garden magazine in February 2003 in response to market research showing the topic was of high importance to our reader targets and had good advertising potential

Improved the content in our weekly entertainment tabloid to make it more lively and more encompassing of the places to go and things to do in both our immediate market and at the nearby Oregon Coast. These improvements were also based on market research.

Enhanced our coverage of state government (Salem is the capital of Oregon) to focus on its impact on workers instead of on the institution.

Improved our promotion of both upcoming and same-day content, using in-paper ads, news briefs, online advertising and point-of-purchase materials.

Conducted a series of focus groups to determine readership interest and satisfaction in our reader target groups.

Brand
Conducted a branding workshop to determine the newspaper's core values and to lay the groundwork on our strategic plan focus.

Created a campaign to promote our news coverage, our Classifieds section and our contributions to the community.

Developed consistent usage guidelines of our masthead and logo.

Service
Developed a customer service committee to identify areas to improve service to readers, advertisers and internal customers.

Enhanced our Web site to offer many customer services online.

Created a committee to identify and address issues related to press starts and trucks leaving on time to ensure timely service to reader.

Culture
Instituted ways to improve accountability for all employees.

Encouraged workers to be less risk-adverse and to think creatively to develop ways to better serve our readers, advertisers and the community.



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 market research, conducted in 2001, indicated a strong need for better home and garden coverage. The result is our weekly Real Living section, launched in February 2003. Year-to-date single copy sales are up 2.3% and Friday has become our second largest weekday for single copy sales. On the advertising side, we have generated $200,000 in incremental revenue.

While research was instrumental in identifying the need and in providing input on content, layout, promotion, etc., we also attribute the product's success to the fact that we appointed an inter-departmental committee to develop the content, advertising, distribution and marketing plans so that each department knew the importance of the product and that we had buy-in from our mid-level managers.



What is the most persuasive indication you have that your readership efforts are producing results?
Our single copy sales up year-over-year through the end of June for four of five weekdays. We have also gained positive anecdotal feedback from focus groups, advertisers and readers.



What is the most important lesson you have learned as you have worked on readership in the last few years?
That increasing readership is the responsibility of every department at the newspaper. Our success with the inter-departmental committee for the Real Living showed that this approach can be very successful. Also, it will take a concerted effort to get every employee to focus on readership as a measure of our success rather than to rely solely on circulation volumes.



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 will increase the amount of upcoming and same-day content promotion in July. We did implement a plan to promote content last year, but have delayed creating a more complex plan as we improved other content areas over the past couple of years.

We will also look for ways to help improve our Sunday readership, which has slipped over the past 12 months.

Getting Traction on Readership

Survey Responses by Topic & Newspaper