Readership Newsletter December 22, 2009 - Issue #10
Planting New Ideas: How to Grow Your Readership
MPA staff has been publishing Planting New Ideas for some time now and we'd like to find out from our members how it's working.
Please e-mail us at readership@michiganpress.org and let us know what you think. What were some of the good ideas? What ideas could you have lived without?
We are also looking for other ideas to help newspapers all over the state grow their readership. If you've seen anything interesting in your travels, or have been doing something innovative at your paper forward the idea to us and we'll get the word out.
Don't forget to visit our Web site MichiganPress.org to find out what's new at Michigan's newspapers.
�We�re not losing readers. They�re just coming to us in different mediums.�
At the Times Publishing Co., publisher of the St. Petersburg Times and other publications, an increase in audience numbers is due to several factors, says Jerry Hill, director of audience and new business development.
“We continue to provide our readers outstanding content. We’ve re-examined and re-designed what we do at the newspaper, making the product more engaging and tightening up sections to encourage increased time spent with the product,” Hill says. “We’ve got tbat, a free publication that targets 29 to 39 year olds, and traffic on tampabay.com is huge. In addition, our two new Senior Living Guide magazines are a perfect compliment to our products.
On September 10, the company will launch a little sister publication that targets high school students in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties. The majority of articles will be written by students and 75,000 copies a week will be distributed by students for 35 weeks during the school year.
“To get buy-in from all the high schools in those two counties was great,” Hill says. “We’ll have a Web component, and with advertising sponsorships, it’ll pay for itself. It’s another extension of our brand. The backbone of the Times is outstanding journalism, and I always tell people, we’re not losing readers. They’re just coming to us in different mediums.”
“With traditional newspapers changing their business models, and our readers coming to us in different ways,” Hill says, “we need to be able to tell our total audience story. The metrics need to be in a consistent format that is clear and concise for our advertisers.”
“The latest ABC/Scarborough numbers show us in the top 15 for audience growth when you combine print and online, but it’s not good enough to grow incrementally anymore,” says Chris Doyle, president and publisher of the Naples Daily News. “We need to grow dramatically and set the bar so much higher than we currently set it.
“We must compare ourselves to the rest of the Internet and not to other newspapers. It’s not print vs. online. It’s total audience vs. total audience. It’s that we need to use all the available tools to grow our audience and be relevant in people’s lives.”
Having the entire newspaper work together as a team to grow audience readership is at the heart of “audience” strategy for The Sacramento Bee, which garnered 3.69 percent growth in combined audience numbers in the latest Audience-FAX.
“Our newspaper has three primary divisions, each owning a part of ensuring that the whole franchise works,” says Dan Schaub, senior vice president of audience development and membership services for The Sacramento Bee and president of NAA’s Circulation Federation Council. “News has responsibility for content on all products. Advertising looks to sell the entire portfolio and shows the advertisers what the audience looks like for each product.
“Audience development and membership services really understands the consumer, so we look to interact with the consumer, and get them to see, know, read, and sign on to our products.”
Schaub says The Sacramento Bee reaches 98 percent of the homes in its market every week through its various products. He notes that while print numbers are down, much of that circulation was targeted, and the current economy no longer allows for a subsidizing of the state circulation market.
NIE was converted to online, and is being transformed from Newspapers In Education to Media In Education, offering teachers curriculum guides and students help with research online.
Surveys are frequently done, asking readers what they think of the newspaper’s service and products, and The Bee responds to the feedback.
“We do have losses in home delivery with households that are now financially challenged,” Schaub says. “The good news is when they stop the print subscription, they log on to our Web site, which is free, so we haven’t lost those folks in total.’
Schaub says the newspaper and Web site have both been redesigned, and new features are added to the Web site on an ongoing basis. Making the site richer has meant adding the ability for readers to comment on stories, share photos, and peruse searchable databases.
Edited from NAA
The Audience Metrics of Success
The source for the audience measurements for the newspapers identified in this story is ABC’s Audience FAX . The data is readily accessible online using ABC’s Audience-FAX* eTrends Tool or at AudienceFax.com.
The tool is designed to allow users to create trending reports by reporting period on newspaper’s average circulation, average print and online readership, total combined audience, and total unique Web site users.
For purposes of this story audience is defined as print/online readership measured within the newspapers DMA. Unless noted otherwise it is net combined audience, past seven days in print and 30 days online and comparing the six months ending March 2009 to the same period in March 2008 based upon the data from Scarborough Research.
Winter in Michigan brings lots of crazy weather but it also brings an opportunity for newspapers to develop new content to improve readership.
Highlighting the various activities in your community like snow festivals and winter carnivals will draw readers who want to know where and when.
Providing a special book section for “curl up by the fire” reads is also a good way to provide the community with useful information.
As the snow flies, safety also becomes a concern. Stories about road safety and avoiding hypothermia are a sure bet to draw interest and give people something to talk about.
Finally, January is a prime time to emphasize self-improvement. Special sections on fitness, diet and other health related content are sure to be helpful as people try to stick with New Year’s resolutions.
For some good
examples of these ideas check out the following links:
