Sept. 19, 2005

By WILLIAM J. WATSON
Pocono (Pa.) Record managing editor

Our Reader Behavior Scores (www.readership.org/consumers/rbs/main.htm) rose from 3.46 three years ago to 3.86 in September 2004, and with the national average for newspapers at 3.56 in 2003, folks are asking what we did to get this result.

The more I thought about this the more I realized the specific goals we chose in pursuit of readership initiatives were probably less important than our approach. Following are some specifics:

Click on the above photos to view a larger version.

We are a 21,000 daily, 26,000 Sunday-circulation newspaper with single copy sales near 50 percent. We already had redesigned the paper to be sure readers had a reasonably dependable format, but we're still forced to switch B and C (Lifestyle/Sports) now and then to account for small issues and the classified load. Overall, though, you can count on things being in the same place most every day. Also, we were already heavily local: There's rarely more than one national or world story on page one and many days there aren't any — those stories are there, but you'll find them on A5.

In a nutshell, here are a few of the things we sought from the Readership Institute's findings (some being our interpretation of what they identified):

• Presentation: Better presentation of material, with useful breakouts, summaries and updates, and multi-photo layouts. Time-short readers are in our thoughts as we design pages.

• Photos: Better use in general.

• Broad appeal: Increased emphasis on stories with wider appeal than just the geography where they occurred, including some effort to encourage more skillful, effective and compelling reporting.

• Promotion: A tremendous focus on advance promotion of upcoming stories, which required better planning and communication.

Most of those things, but especially the advance promotions, work well to increase readership and single copy sales. Advance promotion gives someone a reason to buy a paper in the future. There's a part of all of us that says "RBS is nice, but damn, let's try to actually sell some more papers."

Regardless of all the ABC sleight of hand that's allegedly going on, the average person — and the average advertiser — can understand circulation and market share, and if we could do something with those numbers, we wanted to make sure we did.

The process we used to get results might be the tool folks find most useful, rather than the readership initiatives we happened to choose to fit our paradigm.

I counted and scored what we had of those initiative items in the paper each day for several months. We then set up a program to categorize and count things each day, producing scores in the various categories and then setting goals that represented an improvement over the benchmark measures I'd taken. We then rewarded progress with modest financial recognition on a team basis.

For instance, the copy desk is responsible for packaging stories. A really basic measurement: Nothing for a plain story, three points for a story with a photo, seven points for a story with more than one photo or with some combination of breakout material and art. The copy desk is also responsible for making sure the advance promotions get in the paper, although the news reporters have to provide the raw material. The desk gets three points for every advance promotion on A1. The news reporting team gets points as individuals for a promotion for their own story, and points for the news team, too, whenever a news story is promoted in advance. And so on.

If a team makes its goal for the month, every person on the team gets the same modest recognition award — $50. If we also happen to increase circulation by a certain amount that month, it's doubled.

As we made goals, we increased them and added more readership tools. One new tool was simply to increase the number of mug shots in the paper. Assess, set a goal, measure the progress. Another was what I'll call "reader contribution," which can range from the 58 people who contributed a brief vignette about their worst Thanksgiving ever for our Lifestyle page to the "in the street" feature we do asking six or eight people their opinion about some burning local news issue that has risen to the top of the pyre.

This all had the effect of acting as a mild challenge, which in turn had the effect of focusing people on what, exactly, they were doing and why they were doing it.

Forget the specifics. What we did was decide what we wanted, measure what we already had and track our progress.

Relentlessly.

We made what amounts to a game out of it, but that and the lure of the modest "recognition" turned out to be useful in keeping people focused as the months unfolded. How often have we initiated new things only to see them dissolve and be forgotten as time passes? Flavor of the week?

We also made provisions for key things like deadlines, which are critical for our early morning runs to stores that are key to our rack sales. The desk gets penalized a point per page for every minute that page is late. I get a report each day from the night before that details what time pages went to image. Missed deadlines are nearly nonexistent.

We also incorporated errors. The desk loses points for errors and misspellings in headlines and cutlines, the two most prominent venues — there you have the setting of priorities. We would of course love to have an error-free newspaper, but because we can't yet do it all, we start with the high-visibility items and track how we're doing. Again, we've reduced errors just because everyone is aware we all think it matters.

• In November 2003 the copy desk racked up 133 points for advance promotions. In November 2004 it was 206 points.

• In November 2003 the copy desk got 536 points for their packaging. In November 2004 it was 686 points. In July, in the middle of converting from DewarView to InDesign, it was 680 points.

Each month I add up all the scores by the five newsroom teams and divide it by the number of days in the month to get a basic daily "readership initiative index." That number was 126 in November 2003 and 176 in November 2004. In July 2005 we hit 201. That's a numerical representation of the new things we're doing that we selected from the Readership Institute's menu of possibilities.

We are also — and I don't think this can be stressed enough — recognizing the added value we get from reporters who seek stories that intrigue, delight, disgust and reveal to audiences beyond municipal boundaries. We are also encouraging them to write in ways that explore how people feel about things, not just what they think about them. Kind of like haiku for journalists — feeling and thought combined produce more insight than either alone.

We have even suggested that on some stories reporters try to write haiku about the topic before they write the actual story — we suggest all kinds of things aimed at helping reporters communicate, sometimes something sticks.

The real message is there's no penalty for trying new things, only disappointment over those who don't try. One reporter actually used the haiku technique when he had a tough situation to distill. It is dreadful haiku, but the stories he then wrote were always great.

Reporters are on teams, but they also compete for an extra prize, the monthly "top gun" award for the reporter piling up the most readership initiative points. It's their choice, $100 or a day off. The reporters who manage to do the things necessary to get stories on page one — more material for breakouts, more work digging up odd angles, more sources providing more depth, more contacts to get the neat stories — are rewarded with more points for a page one story than those whose work makes it only to the local front (A3) or some inside page.

What we wanted to smash was the idea that if you come to work and just produce copy for A8, you've done a good day's work. Maybe, but a story on page one will do more for your readership score than three stories worth an inside page billing. Again, we make it clear what we want and keep reminding people with scoring.

The emphasis on going for the home run with the stories comes at a price — we feel bad that some things aren't getting covered and that's what happens when you have, essentially, nine actual reporters for everything and some folks who are editors and reporters. But it comes down to this: Which set of problems do you want, the ones that come with increased readership or the ones that come because your readership is declining?

If I haven't made it clear: All these numbers are circulated to everyone via email, now that we all have Excel on our newsroom computers. Everybody gets to see where their team is, how it got there, how individual reporters are doing, the full Monty. There was initially some unease, but once people figured out the game was about recognizing improvement and not finding blame, it went away. It's a game, a useful game. I suspect it would have usefulness even without a financial incentive, but that incentive — which won't cost the company more than $40,000 and probably will be a lot less — had tremendous value in conveying to folks that yes, we do want this focus, and we're putting money behind that to show we mean it.

This particular program is 99 percent based on what readers actually see in the paper, so the paper is the measure of progress and everybody can trace back their scores to concrete things. That has real advantages — the numbers go to actual work products, not to schmoozing or nepotism or whatever. However, basing it on what readers actually see makes it difficult to assess the role of some people, like our librarian who helps out a lot with research. So it's not perfect, and other operations may find that they, also, have people who just don't seem to fit on any particular team.

You can reach William J. Watson via e-mail at wwatson@poconorecord.com