May 27, 2006

By DAVID ARKIN
Managing editor, Greater Niagara Newspapers

David Arkin

Editors at Greater Niagara Newspapers probably aren't going to win a Pulitzer Prize anytime soon.

We're probably not going to move on to The New York Times next month either.

But we do have a pretty good understanding of what readers want and how to get them engaged with our products.

How? We ask them often and then deliver.

Greater Niagara Newspapers is made up of five daily newspapers (Niagara Gazette, Lockport Union Sun & Journal Tonawanda News, Median Journal Register and TheAmherstRecord.com and two weeklies (The Kenton and Grand Island Records).

During the past six months, we have launched into a serious reader-driven mindset, implementing a host of features that hit readership-interest areas and involve readers in our products. It's not rocket science.

Here's a look at what we're doing:

Feature pages

What we've done: Implemented six daily feature pages in all daily products – Business and Technology, Health, Food, Home and Garden, Travel and Religion.

What's on the pages: All pages have local content. For example, on the business page we have rotating features – women leaders in business, office features, etc. – along with weekly local business briefs. Centerpieces are local on all pages, but we understand how to utilize good wire. On the business page, for example, we run a rail of "new products" with cutouts of all images. It's readable and interesting to everyone, even non-business page readers. On the travel page we offer three Web sites to go to each week for travel info. On our food page we offer our readers' favorite recipes each week. You get the idea: Local rules, but wire has a place at the table, albeit in a glanced format.

Lifestyle section

What the problem was: Our Lifestyle section, minus a centerpiece on the cover, was all AP and Gannett copy.

Click on the above images to view larger versions.

What we did: We launched a front-to-back local campaign for the section. We brought a "community" page to the section with rails of six events not to miss that next week, a good news feature, a hometown event feature and a local Web site of note. We moved our society page content to this section – weddings, engagements and anniversaries. Our features editor took on a weekly young mother's column on a page where we anchored community listings and military news. We didn't forget chatty national news, as we implemented a "Best Bets" column on the front page that highlights the best CDs, movies and Web sites of note for the week.

Readership involvement

What we've done: Implemented a Reader Advisory Board at the Niagara Gazette. The board has met three times already. We share with readers after each meeting what the board brought up. And we let readers know when we implement a suggestion from the reader board. Also, two weeks ago, we implemented a teen advisory board made up of teenagers from our coverage area. The teens are leading the charge for a new weekly teen page, for which they will write. The page debuts the end of this month. The board meets with us once a month, shares story ideas and we come up with a plan for the next month. We feed them pizza and other good junk food. In addition, all editors now write a weekly column that explains to readers upcoming content, new features and explanations of the decisions we make. The Tonawanda News has started a feature called "What's on your mind" where the paper every Monday answers someone's question. This week's question was "What is the most telling field sobriety test?"

Let readers have fun

What we've done: In Niagara Falls, we've implemented a feature called "Editor for a Day." Once a week, we allow a reader to sit in our daily news budget meeting and actually select stories for the next day. We then run a brief on the front page explaining who the guest was, along with a mugshot and information on why he or she chose the stories. At our newspaper in Lockport, we started a feature called "What is it?" We take a picture of a recognizable item from around town, and readers submit guesses as to what it is. One winner each week gets a gift certificate. Also in Lockport, every Sunday, we offer a quick quiz of the top 10 stories of the week. The answers appear the next week. That feature is a nice way of rehashing the top stories of the week in a fun format.

It's all good

What we've done: Last Thanksgiving Day, we offered a paper filled with nothing but good news. The section will become an annual ritual. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, we asked readers to provide us with details on what they're thankful for. Groupwide, we received more than 1,700 inches. We're seeking other good-news editions, such as a patriotic July 4 edition.

Contests

What we've done: A few weeks before Valentine's Day, we asked people to write in about what they love. We gave the winners of the contest some holiday treats. We received more than 2,000 inches of submissions.

People features

The problem: Our papers were doing a poor job running news about people or profiles.

What we've done: Every paper is now running a weekly people feature. Some papers call it "Saturday People Profile" and others call it "Average Joe." It runs in the same spot on the same day each week. The stories are never about officials, but rather neat people in our communities. Also, all of our papers are now running a feature called "Face Time," which each day features a photo of an area person and a brief paragraph about them on our local Page 3. Sometimes it's a student of the month, and other times it's a business promotion announcement.

Quick features

What we've done: Every paper runs a weekly Q&A with a newsmaker on their front page every week. Also, a weekly Q&A anchors our Sunday business page. This has been a great way of addressing new business stories. Also on that business page, we offer a feature called "User Guide" where readers get quick bites on news they can use, an office question, technology question, etc. In the Sunday Gazette, we started a feature called "What They're Saying About Us," where a reporter looks in other publications, blogs, etc. and details what folks are saying about Niagara Falls.

Reporter notebooks

The problem: We knew reporters had tons of content that wasn't getting in their stories or was falling on 9A in the "other business" of their meeting stories.

What we did: We implemented a rotation of three reporter notebooks. One runs every week, and they feature things like offbeat happenings at the police station or city hall or the quirky things that happen in schools. We promote to our reporters' blogs through the notebooks.

The Internet

The problem: Our Internet numbers were below expectations, even after the redesign of our Web site.

What we did: Realized that bringing back readers to our site throughout the day was key. Every paper is responsible for a daily update to the Web site. Since we're a group, we share the updates, and many days we'll have several updates on each site. Five blogs are now featured on every site, as is a multimedia site where weekly slideshows and AP video are presented along with accompanying stories. We do blogs from high school games and tell readers about those blogs in our print edition. They serve as quarter-by-quarter updates. More is coming. We're training our folks on audio and video right now and expect local clips to be part of our site soon. We aren't afraid of the Internet. We post as much as we can, and it has worked. At one of our papers, we have seen 150,000 more page views in March than we did in February. Every news planning meeting includes a conversation about the Internet.

Promotion and the community

What we did: In addition to a daily front-page promotion to content coming the next day, twice a week, all our daily papers now run a promotion to the next three days of content, featuring four to five stories. It's a great way of getting readers to our features sections. Some of our papers have reached a hand to the community and are leading communitywide projects, such as a trash and graffiti clean up.

TheAmherstRecord.com

What we did: We've started a daily online newspaper, with no print edition accompanying it. The site is maintained by a few staff members. Just like our daily newsrooms do, our site is updated daily, with at least four local news stories, a few sports stories and scores, community news, opinions and more.

Public Record

What we did: We added health inspection reports, marriage licenses and foreclosures to a page called "For the Record" in our Sunday edition. It's a great way of offering groupwide info, and more is coming.

Votes

What we did: Every Sunday we offer a chart detailing how lawmakers in our area voted that week.

The future

A weekly teen page starts in a few weeks.

A redesigned 1A rail is coming. It will highlight three things you need to know, a community activity, and will tease inside stories.

A redesigned page 2A will give readers a glance at today's talkers, highlights of our blogs, calendars and more – a real morning coffee page.

A weekly sports recreation page will highlight hunting, fishing, running news and more.

A weekly golf page will offer tips, columns, courses of note and more.

This stuff is not hard. It takes planning, planning and planning and a buy-in from your staffs. We believe readers would rather get a Q&A or a weekly profile feature than their seventh meeting story of the week. We have to cover everything in our communities, but we also need to give readers content that's easy to breeze through and fun to read.

David Arkin can be reached at arkind@gnnewspaper.com