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theInlanderknowledge for newspapersMARCH 2009 | Vol. 23, No. 3

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GROW CIRCULATIONClosely watching the numbers givescirculation managers a solid base forgrowing readership.PAGE 9

IMPROVE CLASSIFIED SALESMake your newspaper a top destination for classified ads with areader-centered approach.PAGE 10

March 11 | Webinar

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PART OF THE CELEBRATIONNational Nurses Week in May couldprovide a special section opportunity for your paper.PAGES 12 AND 13

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DATA COURTESY OF SEYFARTH SHAW LLP

GRAPHIC BY MICHELLE FINKLER/ASSOCIATE EDITOR

By Michelle FinklerASSOCIATE EDITOR

If you think unions only tar-get large newspapers, thinkagain.

“The old view that unionswere always interested in bigcompanies is not true,” saidBill Schurgin, partner at Sey-farth Shaw LLP in Chicago.

“Small newspapers need to beconcerned. There are going tobe unions that will come afterdifferent newspapers than wewould historically think.”

Newspaper companies couldpotentially see an increase inunion activity if the Employ-ee Free Choice Act becomeslaw, Schurgin said during a re-

By Adolfo MendezEDITOR

In the good and bad times, pub-lishers should make cultivatinga close relationship with their top10 advertisers a priority—meet-ing with each of them once amonth or once a quarter, accord-ing to newspaper industry veter-an Tim Garry.

“Your top 10 advertisers arepretty tough to replace,” said Gar-ry, founder and CEO of MyPress-Reports.com, a company that pro-vides newspapers with Web-basedfinancial management software.“Your top 10 advertisers are thecornerstone of your enterpriseand you should really take a per-sonal interest in their wealth, in

their worries, their concerns—anything that you can do to helpthem to survive, because they arekey to your survival.”

Garry, who entered the news-paper industry in 1978, is a for-mer chief financial analyst at theCleveland Plain Dealer and a for-mer publisher with Hirt Media.During a recent Inland Press We-binar, he discussed several key fi-nancial and operating metricsnewspaper executives need tomonitor if they’re to improvetheir company’s financial per-formance.

“Key metrics has become abuzz word in our economy late-ly,” Garry said. “What it reallymeans is that you’re looking at

Analyzing ‘key metrics’ canboost financial performance

METRICS: CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

Union election win rate

Will unions targetsmall newspapers?Attorneys explain why it could happen

EFCA: CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

More than 50 percent of workers at U.S. companies havevoted in favor of unions every year since 2005.

PAGE 14 The Inlander | www.inlandpress.org | MARCH 2009

Ideas

cent Inland Press Webinar.The Employee Free Choice Act

“will make it dramatically easi-er for unions to organize,” saidKen Dolin, also a partner at Sey-farth Shaw LLP. “This is not go-ing to be great news for many em-ployers.”

The EFCA, which would alterthe National Labor Relations Act,is likely to pass, Schurgin said. Ithas the backing of powerful unionlobbyists and President Obama’spro-union administration.

Schurgin and Dolin said theEFCA would change three majoraspects of labor law: it would re-move an employer’s right to a se-cret ballot election, there would beincreased penalties for employerswho engage in “unfair labor prac-tices,” and it would permit the fed-eral government to assign an ar-bitrator and impose a two-year con-tract under certain conditions.

Under current law, Dolin saidemployers now have the right to asecret ballot general election whendeciding union representation.“EFCA will eliminate secret bal-lot election and will be replaced bycard-check recognition,” he said.

Eliminating secret ballots andreplacing them with card checksconducted in public gives unionsan unfair advantage in organizing,businesses argue. It’s also unde-mocratic and unwise, Dolin said.

“Cards are unreliable; they cancontain forged employee signa-tures, misrepresentations andthreats. Even if there are no for-geries, misrepresentations andthreats, employees may feel pres-sured in the presence of a unionsolicitor,” Dolin said.

With the card-check system,Schurgin said it would be more at-tractive to unions to target small-er newspapers and other types ofsmaller companies. “If there’s only20 or 30 employees, it’s easier forunions to get cards signed,” hesaid.

Another change: shortening thelength of the campaign period,making it more difficult for em-ployers to state their case againstunions. Under current law, oncethe union-recognition cards aresigned by 30 percent of employeesand a petition is filed, there usual-ly is a campaign period lasting 39

days or more. Then, an election isheld, after which certification canbe issued if election results dic-tate.

However, with the EFCA, onceorganization begins, the union sim-ply needs to obtain card-check sig-natures from 50 percent of employ-ees. Once 50 percent or more aresecured,certification is issued.Theelection can take place within daysand sometimes without the com-pany even being aware of theunion’s presence, Dolin said.

“Unions claim secret ballot elec-tions favor employers because em-ployers launch extensive anti-union campaigns during the post-petition period, including anti-union captive audience speechesand one-on-one meetings betweensupervisors and employees,” hesaid. However, “Arguments byunions, though, ignore that unionsare winning elections at the samerate at which they did over 30 yearsago.”

Passage likely

The EFCA passed in the Housein 2007 but stalled in the Senate. Atthe time, President Bush immedi-ately promised a veto.Unlike Bush,the Obama administration is mostlikely going to make EFCA a toppriority, Schurgin said.

As evidence, they offered thisextended quote from PresidentObama, taken from a speech hegave in Dubuque, Iowa, in Novem-ber 2007:

“We’re ready to take the offensefor organized labor.It’s time we havea president who didn’t choke say-ing the word ‘union.’ We need tostrengthen our unions by lettingthem do what they do best — organ-ize our workers. If a majority ofworkers want a union, they shouldget a union. It’s that simple. We needto stand up to the business lobbythat’s been getting their friends inCongress and in the White House toblock card check. That’s why I wasone of the leaders fighting to passthe Employee Free Choice Act.That’s why I’m fighting for it in theSenate. And that’s why we’ll makeit the law of the land when I’m pres-ident.”

Schurgin expects the new EFCAto be introduced before April. “Wemay see an amended version of theEFCA. They have to pass it in

2009,” Schurgin said. “Theirchances are as good today as they’llever be. They’re going to do every-thing they can to get this done bythe end of this year.”

Schurgin said with the new ad-ministration, employers shouldexpect increased government en-forcement, as well as increased la-bor and human rights protection.He said now is the time for employ-ers to start preparing for the pos-sibility of a union targeting theircompany.

Prepare now

“We need to get ahead and beproactive before a union comesinto the picture,” Schurgin said.

He suggested employers writeletters to congressmen and sena-tors. They should also try to cre-ate a workplace environmentwhere union organizing is unat-tractive. For this, an employee at-titude survey can be helpful. Toboost morale, Schurgin said news-papers should increase the use ofrecognition awards and publicizeaccomplishments by the paperand its employees.

Also, Schurgin said managersshould take the time to evaluatethe entire newspaper, all of itspolicies, employee handbooks andpersonnel manuals to identify andresolve issues now to thwart thepossibility of a union recogniz-ing any vulnerability.

“If you use the analogy of adoctor, you’re conducting a com-plete physical of the entire com-pany,” he said.

Schurgin also suggested edu-cation of supervisors and employ-ees on the impact of unions andthe newspaper’s position on them,lawfully urging them not to signbecause there’s “no secondchance by virtue of vote.”

Businesses shouldn’t be put offpreparing now for the change tocome, they said. “This is a wake-up call for all of us who said, ‘Wewon’t be the target of a unioncampaign,’” Schurgin said.“There is a sea change going onout here. Six months from now,there may be union activity, andyou won’t have time to respond.”

Contacts: Bill Schurgin,wschurgin@seyfarth.com;

Ken Dolin, kdolin@seyfarth.com

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

EFCA: Employers urged to take action

By Adolfo MendezEDITOR

The Virginia Gazette inWilliamsburg, Va., published “In-auguration Lessons for Ameri-ca,” a 44-page special section, inthe Gazette on Jan. 17.

“It was intended to succinctlyrecall the presidency of each ofPresident Obama’s predecessorsand walk him through their suc-cesses and failures,”said Publish-er Bill O’Donovan. “One recur-ring lesson learned is to pick bet-ter cabinet members. Another isto watch your health,and to weara bulletproof vest,” he added.

“The edition was inserted inour Saturday paper, and wepadded the draw 40 percent,”O’Donovan said. “Returns showwe nearly doubled our streetsales to 7,891. It was a huge hitamong the readership,” he said.

The section included five-partcoverage on President Obama—how he got elected, what he didright, what went wrong, what les-sons are there for Obama and les-sons for the country.

“Key to our success was asavvy professor who aligned all43 presidents with other faculty

whom I persuaded to partici-pate,” O'Donovan said. “Theirchallenge was keeping within300 words, which all but two did.”

The section also was prof-itable, he said. “We only grossed$15,000 in advertising but it wasa quick sale under enormoustime constraints,” he said.“Those who passed on it werekicking themselves. Those whowere in it were ecstatic, especial-ly the ones who chose to be on apage or opposite a page of theirfavorite president.”

For example, he said one clientkidded about gaining positionon the page with Jefferson Davis.

Contact: Bill O’Donovan,bodonovan@vagazette.com

The Inauguration Edition published by The Virginia Gazette. The special issuewas a success, with street sales nearly doubling. PHOTO SUPPLIED

Inauguration Edition asuccess at Virginia paper

“Those [advertisers] whopassed on it were kickingthemselves. Those whowere in it were ecstatic,especially the ones whochose to be on a page oropposite a page of theirfavorite president.”

Bill O’Donovan

PAGE 10 The Inlander | InlandPress.org | SEPTEMBER 2009

Special Report

By Michelle FinklerASSocIATE EdIToR

Setting up an online directory for your community can be a great way to connect area businesses with lo-cal customers. And sometimes, an online directory can connect area businesses with not-so-local cus-tomers.

Consider Gazlo.com, a local market directory launched slightly over a year ago by Bliss Commu-nications, based in Janesville, Wis. A man in Greece was conducting an online search for a clock seller—not in any specific town—when Gazlo.com turned up in the search results.

“He wanted to buy a grandfather clock from one of the businesses in the directory,” said Sara Weaver, vice president of Sales and Busi-ness Development for Mediaphor-media, the software division of the World Company, based in Law-rence, Kan.

Weaver said the man interested in buying the clock searched on Google for “clockmaster master clock repair,” and the Gazlo.com site was listed first in the search results.

“We work really hard to make our sites search-engine friendly,” Weaver said. “If they’re using Google to find something locally, it will pop up in searches. When you don’t know what you’re look-ing for, these categories are opti-mizing well.”

Mediaphormedia, which uses El-lington Marketplace as its software, has been partnering with other me-dia companies in helping them de-velop marketplace directory sites. Weaver said that last year, Media-phormedia worked with 27 differ-ent companies in setting up their directories.

When the Lawrence Journal World’s LawrenceMarketplace.com site first launched, Weaver said it took four to six months for it to catch on with local consumers. Through branding and advertising, LawrenceMarketplace.com has be-come a name people recognize, she said. Weaver said the site is now in its third year, and receives more than 225 million page views a month.

“For LawrenceMakretplace.com, in the first year, it brought in just

over $500,000 of revenue,” she said. “More recently, as we’ve launched the Wenatchee World’s Marketplace, it had an even quick-er success with $165,000 in the first week.”

Business advantages

Media companies that set up an online directory can decide to call it whatever they want, whether that be Marketplace or a name more specific to the area, such as The Janesville Gazette’s Gazlo.com. But even with different names, all of the various Ellington Market-place sites are similar in what they offer advertisers and consumers.

“It’s what consumers are used to getting when they get a Google site,” Weaver said. “To compete with Yahoo!, Google and the Yel-low Pages, we have to offer more for free. We can’t nickel and dime our advertisers. We add a photo, business hours, name, address and phone number, a link to their Web site, a map and methods of payment for free. Most of our partners would agree that you only get one chance to make your directory useful for consumers or they won’t come back.”

On the homepage of each site, there’s a search bar to enter key words, business name or location, and there’s also an option to refine the search by entering a zip code or address so users can find results close to them, Weaver said. There are three rotating ad positions in the middle of the homepage for busi-nesses that expand their listing. It is rotated with an unlimited spon-sorship position. Newspapers also charge extra for access to the right rail, which Weaver said is another revenue stream.

“Homepage right-rail ads go for about $300,” she said. “Lawrence charges $500 to $700. You have to look at what you’re charging for your own newspaper site and make it make sense.”

On the left side of the homepage is a list of categories to choose from, such as Arts and Entertain-ment, Automotive, Food & Dining, Health Care and Retail, to name a few.

“If you were to choose a catego-ry for Food & Dining, there’s a page for that category,” Weaver said. “Then there are sub catego-

ries. There are also sponsorship positions where a business can sponsor a category.”

Upgraded listings

Businesses can also opt to up-grade to a “basic” or “expanded” listing that offers features that go beyond what’s available for free. “Basic” listings include a business profile, listing in up to five catego-ries, unlimited keywords, a photo gallery and a custom meta descrip-tion tag for search engine optimiza-tion.

“For a basic listing, I’ve it seen go for $44 up to $99 dollars a month,” Weaver said. “A lot of people adopt the same strategy. You can list up to five categories. We list you in one category, and we’ll charge you to be listed in more than one category.”

The “expanded” listing also has tabs for videos with a built-in Flash video player. Companies can up-load ads and coupons that they’re running. They can also list a num-ber of products, post calendar events and a staff directory.

Weaver said the expanded listing costs anywhere from $100 to $250 a month, with the most common price being $200 a month.

Weaver said the upgraded listing options give a boost to many busi-nesses, especially small ones that may not have the time or resources to devout to building and maintain-ing a Web site.

“We found in the market, most businesses have a Web presence, but the site might have been de-signed by your nephew,” Weaver said. “When they see our site, they thought it was useful. Businesses are putting in a lengthy profile. Some companies are even using the Marketplace site as their primary site.”

Contact: Sara Weaver, sweaver@ellingtoncms.com

Local business directories match readers with advertisers

Expanded listing

Basic listing

Free listingArchived WebinarThis and other Webinars are available in Inland’s Archived Webinars collection.Visit InlandPress.org and click on “Archived Webinars” under the “Training” tab.

“You only get one chance to make your directory useful to consumers or they won’t come back,” said Sara Weaver, vice president of Sales and Business development for Mediaphormedia. Above: Screen shots from LawrenceMarketplace.com. Images supplIed

JANUARY 2010 | InlandPress.org | The Inlander PAGE 7

Ideas

By Michelle FinklerAssocIATe edIToR

Many newspapers take a “more is more” ap-proach to Web site design, which they inherited from the early dial-up days of the Internet, ac-cording to media consultant Bill Ostendforf. These news sites contain long-scrolling homep-ages with too many headlines, links, photos and advertisements.

This type of Web design is bad for business, Ostendorf said. It doesn’t help advertisers get noticed by readers, he said.

Ostendorf, who spent 13 years at The Provi-dence (R.I.) Journal before leaving in 2000 to do full-time consultancy work, recalls sitting in an editors’ meeting at the paper some 15 years ago. “We had a meeting about [going] online and editors said, ‘This is great! We can put 100 things on a page! There’s no limit!’” said Ostendorf, president of Creative Circle Media Consulting in Providence, R.I.

“It’s not true,” Ostendorf said. “Having judg-ment still counts, having priorities still counts, limited ad positions counts. If there are two or three ads, we ensure the advertisers’ ads are going to get noticed.”

Scrolling length

Ostendorf said newspaper publishers need to rethink their sites’ scrolling lengths and try to keep the homepage to one “page” or screen view. He cited Poynter Institute’s EyeTrack research that showed long-scrolling homepages don’t get much traffic beyond the first page.

“You lose 95 percent of your business after the first screen, but we still make long-scrolling pages,” he said. “I would say to papers, ‘Why don’t we just end the page here [at the bottom of the first screen]?’ They say, ‘Because I have ad positions down there.’ But you can see that no-body is looking there. Nobody even saw this ad at the bottom. We have to get people to look at the ads and click on them.”

Ostendorf said the research showed the most effective ads were part of Web pages that did not scroll. With scrolling pages, the research showed that eyeballs tend to flow down the page and skip over the ads. When the page doesn’t scroll, there were more clicks on editorial content and there was more traffic on the ads.

“Not scrolling forces people to see more of the page,” he said.

Ad positions

When designing news sites, newspapers need to take into account the hotspots shown in the EyeTrack research to ensure advertisers’ ads will have prominence on the page, Ostendorf said.

“When we design a page, we have to be aware of the hotspots,” he said. “We’ve been able to take ad click-through rates up three to six times. It makes a huge difference how much you cram onto a page.”

Ostendorf said fewer bigger ads are better than lots of little ads. Ostendorf also recommended varying the ad sizes because this will draw more attention to them.

For Web pages that have a story on them, Os-tendorf said it’s OK for the page to scroll since it’s a non-landing page. He said scrolling works on these story pages because the Web user is reading or looking at data that he or she is already interested in.

“Where do we put ads on story pages?” Osten-dorf asked. “We often put them in the story. You get this problem for the reader where they have to read around this junk. Or they put all the ads on the right-hand side and no one wants to look at them.”

Ostendorf suggests using three ad positions on a story page in varying sizes and positions, such as an ad above the header, along the right rail and within a story or below a photo within a story. The design of each page can differ by enlarging photos or displaying video to go along with the story. Ostendorf added that having a stronger visual in the middle of the page will keep a read-er on the page longer.

“Taking it a step further, if they are flash ads and if they have more movement, I want to spread them out more,” he said. “If we isolate them in space or size, they will get higher readership. They shouldn’t compete with each other. You need to give each advertiser room to succeed.”

Examples

Ostendorf recommends newspaper publishers look at the layout of successful commercial Web sites for examples of good Web design. Ostendorf suggests visiting Web sites of companies such as Dell, Southwest Airlines, Google and Apple. All of the sites have short-scrolling homepages. Os-tendorf liked Apple’s site because of its clean look, white background and focus on a large, visual element.

For examples of news sites that have good Web designs, Ostendorf mentioned the Providence (R.I.) Business News at PBN.com and the Bangor (Maine) Daily News at BangorDailyNews.com. Both sites have short-scrolling homepages and few ad positions.

“So many newspaper Web sites are just thrown up there, and they’re using this mediocre design from 15 years ago,” Ostendorf said. “They’re us-ing these ad shapes and designs that haven’t been well thought-out. We’re not doing it well. So many newspaper Web sites are doing so badly at the basics.

“I urge you to get back to basics and have fun. It’s fun, not scary,” he said. “I knew nothing—nothing—about the Web; now I run a software company.

“You can succeed online.”

Contact: Bill ostendorf, bill@creativecirclemedia.com

Is the design of your Web site helping or hurting your advertisers?

on Web pages that have stories on them, news sites generally place the ads within the story (shown at left), which can make reading difficult, or along the right rail (shown at right), where Web users ignore them, media consultant Bill ostendorf said. Images supplIed

ostendorf suggests using three ad positions on a story page in varying sizes and positions, such as an ad above the header, along the right rail and within a story (shown at right) or below a photo within a story (shown at left). Having a fourth smaller ad (shown at right) in the right rail works in this layout because its small size makes it stand out, he said.

ostendorf suggests making a visual element in the center of the page such as a video or photo larger on a story page because it will keep readers on the page longer.

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Mailed Monday, Dec. 27, 2010, from Sterling, Ill.Inform post office if it arrives after Jan. 10.

theInlanderknowledge for newspapersJANUARY 2011 | Vol. 25, No. 1

READY TO HIRE? READ THISRemove the barriers to hiring the ‘best and the brightest’ with these proven tips.PAgE 9

COMPETITION HEATS UPAOL’s Patch joins the fragmented media landscape in search of local advertising dollars.PAgES 12-13

FELLOWSHIP PROgRAMWhy a Wick Communication’s web developer has a strong passion for newspapers.PAgE 14

Additional training information on pages 17 or visit InlandPress.org. Select “Event Registration” under the “Training” tab.

Inland training

Jan. 13 | Webinar

Demystifying Digital Sales for Legacy Print TeamsThis Inland Webinar will help take the fear factor out of online ad programs for traditional print reps who still feel more confident sell-ing print over digital ads. Topics covered will include simplifying the sales process; comparing and contrasting the online vs. print au-dience; targeting other media for real incremental revenues; and de-mystifying online terminology.WITH SCOTT ROSENbERg, DIgITAL MARkETINg SPECIALIST, STRATEgY2 DIgITAL, CRYSTAL LAkE, ILL.

Jan. 26 | Webinar

Write Tighter and FasterWith a little planning and a bit of deconstruction and focus of your story idea, you’ll write more effi-ciently. You’ll also learn to use powerful words and fewer awk-ward transitions in a session that will improve your story lengths and writing speed.WITH kIM STRONg, DIRECTOR OF bUSINESS DEvELOPMENT AND WRITINg COACH, THE PATRIOT-NEWS, HARRISbURg, PA.

“I just wanted to send you a quick note to compliment Inland on a Webinar. It’s almost like bits and pieces of great informa-tion we have received through many Inland seminars all came together for us through the In-land Webinar, “A Close Exami-nation of the Agency Approach for Sales Force Organization,” with Greg Swanson. Our group spent another 30 minutes brain-storming after the session and came out with a shared focus for improvement for our sales reps and, most importantly, our cus-tomers. It will take time and a lot of work, but our team seems to be on a common path to real-ize improvement. Thanks for a job well done.”

— Jeffrey N. Evans, publisher, Ludington (Mich.) Daily News

Preserving advertising revenue as competition growsBy Michelle FinklerAssociAte editor

Non-newspaper sales people are approaching your advertising cli-ents an average of 22 times a month, according to research conducted by ITZBelden.

“That includes Groupon, Living Social, mobile sites, somebody in-side a garage who’s got a cool idea for your town—all kinds of peo-ple,” said Greg Swanson, president of Portland, Ore.-based ITZ Pub-lishing, which conducted the re-search in partnership with Belden Interactive, also based out of Port-land.

“Out of the 22 people who asked to give a pitch, our local retailers are taking about seven of those calls,” Swanson said. “What’s go-ing on here is our advertisers are being educated about twice a week about ways they should advertise, and we’re either helping them fig-ure out what to do on the basis of what they’re hearing or we’re not.”

Unlike other studies that survey businesses in general, the ITZ-Belden research is based on actual newspaper contacts. The findings are based on input from 2,840 small- and medium-sized busi-nesses identified as advertising clients or prospects for the local paper. The advertisers agreed to participate in the study, which was completed in September 2010, upon an invitation by 81 newspa-pers in 40 states.

Newspaper sales reps who are not conversant with the various products that are constantly being pitched to your customers and the wide range of advertising options they have, undermine your ability to sell solutions to local business

“because we look like we’re lim-ited consultants,” Swanson said.

Sales reps need to identify all of the different products available in their markets and understand how they are being sold, he said.

“If we’re not selling keywords in search, if we’re not selling e-mail push, if we’re not helping facilitate map-based advertising, if we’re not selling mobile and video ads, if we’re not selling the things they’re buying, all we know for sure is that this money is going to someone else.”

According to ITZBelden, 45 per-cent of businesses use three to five

other mediums to advertise besides the print newspaper; 14 percent use two other mediums and 15 percent use six to nine other mediums.

What it boils down to is that newspapers get almost 30 percent of the local businesses’ total spend-ing. Online, the percentage is even smaller.

“If we ask them how much they’re getting in online advertis-ing, it is 13 percent of total spend-ing,” Swanson said. “The maximum we’ll be getting between our print product and online product is some-where around 40 percent of their spending, or $4 out of $10. The

question is, what other products can we offer to get some of those $6?”

New model

The solution isn’t giving “a whole bunch more stuff for our sales people to sell,” Swanson said. The answer is to restructure your sales organization to more resemble an agency model, with smart bun-dles based on business category, he said. ITZBelden data of business owners’ interests can serve as a di-rectional aid for newspapers as they decide what offerings should be in

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Under Siege

in september 2010, itZ Publishing and Belden interactive completed a survey of small- and medium-sized businesses in active correspondence with local newspapers as advertising clients or prospects. this graph shows data in response to this question: “in an average month, with how many advertising sales people do you speak, in person or on the phone, among these in-coming efforts?” on average, business owners receive 22 approaches a month and listen to pitches from seven of those approaches a month.

SOURCE: ITzBELDEN | GRAPhIC BY: MIChELLE FINkLER

Sales pitches from non-newspaper advertising sales people

Advertising: continued on PAge 11

JANUARY 2011 | InlandPress.org | The Inlander PAGE 11

Ideas

each category’s package. For example, a majority of local

businesses still think primarily about their own website when they think about spending money online. According to the research, 82 per-cent of newspaper clients said their No. 1 marketing strategy is main-taining a company website. The second is sponsoring events (54 percent), and the third is maintain-ing the company’s Facebook or MySpace page (45 percent).

“Social media comes before in-store promotions (35 percent), on-line coupons (23 percent) or selling goods over the Internet (20 per-cent),” Swanson said. “The fact that the third most common thing is something with social media says to me that our customers are start-ing to explore social media and they could really use our help.”

Many businesses have undergone budget reductions and moved ef-forts to inexpensive or free sites like Twitter or Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they’re successful at it, he said.

“They need a newspaper or trust-ed vendor to act as a broker for these products,” he said. “Busi-nesses like the idea of self-admin-istered advertising, but if we can show that we do it well, they’ll buy from us.”

But keep in mind that one size does not fit all, he said. While so-cial media may be important to some businesses, it’s not for every-one. For example, 60 percent of car dealerships were interested in main-taining a Facebook or MySpace page, but only 26 percent of the finance category and 33 percent of health care.

“When we start thinking about the agency approach, we have to say, ‘Here are the packages right for the arts and entertainment category, health care, real estate, financial,’” Swanson said. “The product suite you would offer a restaurant wouldn’t be the same as you would offer a Realtor, since you don’t sell discount coupons for a house.

“The idea here is with the sim-plest packages, you have a share of voice in print, on the website, in social media, on mobile, and if you want to buy additional elements, what you’re doing is expanding

your share of voice in those chan-nels or adding additional chan-nels.”

Sales reps

Successfully launching an agen-cy model at your newspaper will require a big commitment in the form of extensive training for sales reps, Swanson said. When Hearst Corp. decided to pursue an agency approach at the Houston Chronicle, it launched a new business catego-ry package each month and held hour-long training sessions every Monday for 18 months to train staff on the different components of each package.

Swanson said newspapers also should address misconceptions that sales staff have about advertiser interests and align their go-to-mar-ket strategy with what businesses are interested in buying, as opposed to what newspapers currently sell, such as display ads.

“When we asked our sales man-agers what the most important met-ric was for selling advertisers, the No. 1 answer was click-throughs (66 percent),” he said. “When we asked our advertisers what they were interested in, first was cus-tomers visiting their store (58 per-cent), next impressions (50 per-cent), next frequency (49 percent) and next reach (48 percent).

“Surprisingly, click-throughs (45 percent) came pretty far down the list, which shows that our advertis-ers seem to understand that reach-ing people with some frequency and letting them see the ad is more important than whether or not they clicked through,” he said.

Another challenge for newspa-pers implementing an agency mod-el involves conquering fears of tra-ditional sales reps, Swanson said.

“The real thing I think they’re afraid of is if I show my customers that these other mediums really work, they’re going to leave print and buy that,” he said. “What I’m saying is bundle it so they can’t. As we sell these packages, part of what we’re trying to do is say this: ‘No, we don’t have a mobile solution not connected to print. You may come to believe that this mobile coupon redemption is where you’re getting the value. But in fact, the value for the mobile coupon is partly driven by the ad we had in the paper,

which helped people understand who you are.’”

Swanson said the whole idea of the agency approach is not to help advertisers select which component of the package works, but rather to say all these parts synergistically work together. Secondly, since many reps and, frankly, newspaper customers don’t understand the value of these new advertising me-diums, it’s difficult to get reps to assert their value or convince cus-tomers to try them.

“The way we introduce these new products that many of our cus-

tomers will find will deliver them results is by forcefully tying the products to a suite,” he said. “What we’re saying to our advertiser is, ‘We don’t want you to buy the Houston Chronicle; we want you to buy Houston. The way you do that is by having a presence on our website, newspaper, specialty pub, mobile, Facebook, Twitter and on many other places, and our goal is to drive people to buy your product or come to your restaurant or sale; it’s not to get you to buy one or another of these products.’”

Swanson also discussed changing

the compensation program to re-ward sales reps not only for hitting their print and online goals but also for the total number of customers they have. He said the idea is to in-crease the total number of customers participating with the newspaper.

He said newspapers are also well-positioned to offer advertisers “agency” services, such as graphic design, video production and lead-generation programs, to their local clients.

Contact: Greg Swanson, greg@itzpublishing.com

Advertising: Align your strategy to what clients are interested in buyingCoNTINUed fRom PAGe 1

Mailed Wednesday, Jan. 26, from Sterling, Ill.Inform post office if it arrives after Feb. 9.

theInlanderknowledge for newspapersFEBRUARY 2011 | Vol. 25, No. 2

Family OwnershipHow Shaw Media’s management team copes with challenges to the business model.pages 12-13

inland FellOwInside the one-person shop at a small Texas weekly and how she gets the job done.page 14

ClassiFied salesImprove classified sales by forgetting about the old ways of doing business.page 22

Additional training information on page 17 or visit InlandPress.org. Select “Event Registration” under the “Training” tab.

Inland training

Feb. 9 | Webinar

Creating a Culture of innovation and Customer Focus That worksFind out how the Sales and Mar-keting Division of the Palm Beach Post transformed its sales culture by creating a consultative, cus-tomer-focused sales force, with solution-based selling to help businesses develop real solutions to help their businesses grow in a tough economy. Focusing on the customer and their needs, rather than “pitching more products” is a message we can all relate to. Learn how you can take the same concepts and strategies and apply them to your operation to grow revenue through customer service and specialized solutions for your advertisers.wiTh suzanne pepper, direCTOr OF innOvaTive ClienT sOluTiOns, palm BeaCh pOsT, wesT palm BeaCh, Fla.

Feb. 15 | Webinar

improve your newspaper website with Better web designMedia sites are among the most cluttered and dysfunctional sites on the web, and it’s time to shake things up. This Inland Webinar will help you find your own way in-stead of just following the crowd. How can newspapers build audi-ence and develop content for the web through better design? What kinds of solutions can we develop for advertising and revenue growth? This seminar will chal-lenge you to change some core approaches you are taking to your website and give you a lot to think about. Get ahead of the competi-tion with a better perspective on what makes websites work and what is holding newspapers back. wiTh Bill OsTendOrF, presidenT, CreaTive CirCle media COnsulTing, prOvidenCe, r.i.

“Regarding the Inland Webinar, ‘A Close Examination of the Agency Approach for Sales Force Organization,’ with Greg Swanson ... the information was excellent.”

— Paul Burke, advertising director, The Coeur d’Alene Press, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

By Michelle FinklerAssociAte editor

Gone are the days when copy editors would simply edit copy and write headlines.

The skill set required to excel in today’s newsrooms is growing and, in response, journalism schools are adapting the way they teach editing and restructuring their campus newsrooms in hopes of giving stu-dents a better chance of landing jobs after graduation.

The University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., for ex-ample, continue to change their journalism programs to remain vi-able and relevant to prospective recruiters.

“I want to train students who can be good thinkers and be nimble and able to handle any job,” said Jake Sherlock, assistant professor and print editor for the Columbia Mis-

J-schools respond to demands of today’s newsrooms

Assistant copy editor Patrick sweet (right) edits a story while graphics staff member chris spurlock watches from his seat at the interactive copy desk in the columbia Missourian newsroom in september 2010. the transition, an experiment that began in August 2010, split the newsroom’s traditional rim and slot copy desk into two separate desks: interactive and print. Both students are seniors at the University of Missouri in columbia, Mo. PHoTo: CHRISTINA MANoLIS/MISSoURIANJ-schools: continUed on PAge 10

By Adolfo Mendezeditor

With the early success of the iPad, developers saw tre-mendous potential for profit building apps.

“It was not at all uncommon to have vendors come in and say that they would charge publishers anywhere from $100,000 to $750,000 to build an app,” said Ray Marcano, senior manager of Strategic Initiatives for CMGdigital of Cox Media Group Inc., a subsidiary of Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises. “And I know those prices to be factual because I sat in on those presentations.”

What a difference several months make. “You can build apps of any kind now, and the costs don’t

get into the digital game without breaking the bank

daytondailynews.com lets visitors sign up for e-newsletters covering entertainment, sports, business information and local headlines, and breaking news e-alerts. expanding your digital presence doesn’t have to break the bank, according to ray Marcano, senior manager of strategic initiatives for cMgdigital and director of digital strategy at the dayton (ohio) daily news. IMAgE SUPPLIEd digitAl: continUed on PAge 11

PAGE 10 The Inlander | InlandPress.org | FEBRUARY 2011

Ideas

sourian, the 5,900-circulation stu-dent newspaper at the Missouri journalism school. The Missourian is published five days a week and serves as the city’s morning news-paper (the Columbia Tribune cir-culates in the afternoon).

“The days of specialization are waning and waning fast,” Sherlock said. “To get our students ready, they have to have a wide and deep range of skills.”

A unique experiment

In August 2010, the Missourian started an experiment called “The Transition,” which restructured the paper’s newsroom from a rim and slot-style desk to two separate copy desks: interactive and print.

Sherlock said having two sepa-rate desks gives editing and design students a better educational expe-rience and helped shift the news-room’s focus from the print product to the website, ColumbiaMissou-rian.com.

The interactive copy desk is staffed from roughly 9 a.m. to mid-night during the week and focuses on the paper’s web operations, said Nick Jungman, Knight Visiting Editor in the Missourian newsroom and a visiting assistant professor.

The print team still works in the afternoon and evening but focuses on the print product, Sherlock said. In general, students on both copy desks only work in the newsroom eight to 12 hours per week, he added.

Print staff still sits in on after-noon meetings to choose content for the next day’s issue, though the print product is not discussed, Sher-lock said.

“At our 3 o’clock budget meet-ing, some of the editors were talking about what to put in the paper, and I had to say, ‘No, we’re not talking about print. We’re here to talk about web. We’ll figure out what to do with print,’” Sherlock said. “I had some push-back at first, but for the most part, they were very happy to give up that print control.”

To help prepare students for The Transition, Sherlock said staff rear-ranged the newsroom’s desk layout. “We set up the print desk to be away from everybody else,” he said.

What emerged was “The Hub,”

where “primary content producers sit,” such as the city editor, graph-ic artist, photo editor and conver-gence editors, he said.

“What we did on purpose is posi-tion The Hub and the interactive copy desk as the focus of the news-room so everyone would be thinking about online,” he said. The print team was “given our little corner of the newsroom—we’re not in the boiler room or anything—and we’re in charge of thinking about what is best for our print readers. Everyone else is in charge of thinking digital-first. Getting furniture and comput-ers where they needed to be, making a home for everybody, helped to shake us out of our old habits.”

Interactive team

The interactive team includes 17 editors from the News Editing Class, Jungman said. The students work in shifts, with one or two in-teractive copy editors on duty dur-ing the day and three or four in the evening. This is in addition to at least one faculty member and one teaching assistant working on the interactive copy desk most of the time, he said.

“A lot of papers have a web pro-ducer who manages a lot of the interactive,” Jungman said. “We didn’t have any web producers; we thought instead of creating web producers, we would make copy editors handle some of the tasks that web producers do. Copy editors can be seen as needing more to do at times, and the experiment shows us this is a good place to fill in the gaps between when copy arrives.”

Jungman said interactive copy editors have a list of tasks they can do during downtime, such as tweet a story, post a story to Facebook, make sure conversations are civil in comment sections, look for ques-tions to answer within comments, create survey polls and manage the homepage of ColumbiaMissourian.com.

Since The Transition, Jungman said traffic to the website has in-creased by 10 to 15 percent. Cur-rently, the site gets 12,000 to 15,000 unique visitors every day, he add-ed.

“We’re seeing more interactivity on the website,” he said. “There’s more of a conversation with readers in the comments, more presence on

our website than we had before, more frequent and thoughtful up-dates, making better use of social media.”

Print team

The print team typically has eight staffers working on the paper each night, including designers from the Advanced Design Class, a copy editor from the interactive team, a media assistant and teaching assis-tants, Sherlock said.

“The website and the print prod-uct have two completely different audiences—different sets of read-ers,” he said. “A small minority read both, so what we’re trying to do is to tailor content specific to the different mediums. What can we do best for our print reader?”

Sherlock thinks the print product has improved with The Transition by offering readers more thoughtful presentation of stories and pack-ages by adding elements such as info boxes, graphics and timelines. Sherlock cited presentations for the Missourian’s homecoming cover-age, a barbeque festival and the new Harry Potter movie as examples of the benefits of having a team of editors and designers solely focused on print.

Making changes stick

Overall, Sherlock and Jungman said The Transition has been a suc-cess and that the separate interac-tive and print copy desk system will be used during the spring 2011 se-mester.

“I think we’ve been pretty good about telling students that what they’re experiencing under The Transition is an experiment, and

that copy desks operate differently all over the nation,” Sherlock said. “The more important thing to us is that they’re gaining the skills to be successful on any type of copy desk they may join. Some of them will no doubt end up on desks that still focus primarily on print, but it doesn’t mean those web skills won’t come in handy down the line.”

Changes on the print desk next semester will include more integra-tion between news and sports, Sher-lock said. On the interactive desk, Jungman said he wants his interac-tive students to take on additional print desk shifts so they receive more practice writing headlines for print. He also wants to put more emphasis on students initiating con-versations on stories that may not be getting a lot of web traffic by asking readers questions.

“Our students need to have some basic web skills to get jobs,” Jung-man said. “Now, they can say, ‘Not only do I know AP Style, how to write a headline and how to edit a story, but I know how to get a breaking news story in front of an audience, I know how to engage an audience, I know how to moderate a conversation on a message board.’ Those things would be attractive to employers.”

Medill expands instruction

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Ev-anston, Ill., has also changed the way it teaches copy editing in an effort to increase the skills of stu-dents.

“My background is primarily as a copy editor,” said Steven Duke, associate professor at Medill. “I rec-

ognize that the world has changed, and there are fewer and fewer people employed as just copy editors. And you can bemoan a perceived drop in quality, but we’re trying to prepare our students for the real world, and for them to be successful they have to be able to edit themselves.”

Duke said he emphasizes to his students that there are fewer layers of editing at print and online publi-cations alike, and that their stories may not receive extensive editing. Michael Deas, a lecturer at Medill, also stresses self-editing in his class-es, as well as speed and accuracy.

“I emphasize how important it is that they’re fast and accurate be-cause they’re going to be working in the field and won’t have the tra-ditional backstops to catch mistakes that the industry had before,” Deas said. “All of my exercises are dead-line-oriented.”

Duke said Medill has also changed the way it teaches headline writing.

“We teach search engine optimi-zation, things to think about in terms of getting keywords into headlines, not using puns and other sorts of wordplay, which is OK for print, but you would need a differ-ent headline for online,” he said. “If you look at publications, the head-lines in print and online are very different for the same story.”

Duke and Deas said Medill incor-porates multimedia strategies into its classes, such as teaching students the basics of video, audio, photog-raphy, design and social media.

“One of the things Medill does with its students is give them expo-sure to all of the tools they need as journalists, but they can’t be mas-ters at everything,” Duke said. “We have a three-tiered approach: lit-eracy, competency and mastery. We want them to have literacy in every-thing from writing, reporting, video and audio editing, interactive skills. Then they can self-select what they want to do from there. They may decide they really want to be in broadcast or be investigative report-ers, but at least everybody will go through here with the basics.”

Contact: Jake Sherlock,

sherlockj@missouri.edu; Nick Jungman, jungmann@missouri.edu; Steven Duke,

s-duke@northwestern.edu; Michael Deas, m-deas@northwestern.edu

J-schools: Expanded skill sets attractive to prospective employersCoNTINUED FRoM PAgE 1

Columbia Missourian reporters write and edit stories in the newsroom in Lee Hills Hall in September 2010. The newsroom recently underwent some changes through an experiment that separated the copy desk into two teams for interactive and print operations. Photo: ChRIStINA MANoLIS/MISSouRIAN

Mailed Monday, Feb. 21, from Sterling, Ill.Inform post office if it arrives after March 7.

theInlanderknowledge for newspapersMARCH 2011 | Vol. 25, No. 3

There’s no app for ThaTShaw Media forgoes an app for the iPad and creates tablet-friendly websites instead.page 12

The fuTure of mobileThe CEO of Forkfly explains why newspapers are in a strong position to leverage mobile.page 13

The VerY soCiable WeeKlYHow a weekly newspaper editor in Bay City, Texas, leverages Facebook and Twitter.page 14

Additional training information on page 17 or visit InlandPress.org. Select “Event Registration” under the “Training” tab.

Inland training

March 3 | Webinar

for editorial Departments: narrative WritingThis Inland Webinar will help your newsroom tell superior long, me-dium or short narrative stories. Ideal for both new and veteran journalists, you’ll learn techniques that are the foundation of good writing. Among the highlights of this presentation will be the sev-eral examples of writing that we will closely examine with the ulti-mate goal of becoming better sto-rytellers and producing products that truly engage your readers’ in-terests. WiTh Kim sTrong, DireCTor of business DeVelopmenT anD WriTing CoaCh, The paTrioT-neWs, harrisburg, pa.

March 10 | Webinar

Creating effective sales scriptsEvery sales presentation should be scripted, but they should never sound scripted. This old adage is true whether your reps are out-bound prospecting for new busi-ness, upselling voluntary advertis-ers or soliciting renewals. Some of these “conversational scripts” should be followed as closely as possible, while others should be “points to cover” in the sales pre-sentation. This Inland Webinar will provide a few sample scripts that you can modify for use at your publication, as well as learn the “dos and don’ts” of effective sales script order, phrasing and timing.WiTh riCharD ClarK, presiDenT, ClassifieD DeVelopmenT, Johnson CiTY, Tenn.

“The Inland Webinar information was well presented, and the techonology worked well. Even though the presenter was from a newspaper much larger than ours, I took away information that I will use. It is easily worth the time and money.”— Curt Jacobs, general manger,

The Madison (Ind.) Courier

By Inland Staff

Tom Slaughter, a former execu-tive with The Associated Press, was named Inland executive director on Jan. 27 in a unanimous decision by the Inland board of directors. As part of the transition at Inland, Patty Slusher will now play an ex-panded role at the 126-year-old trade association as the director of Membership and Programming.

Slaughter, former vice president

of U.S. Newspaper Markets for AP, created AP Digital before heading the company’s new media business unit. “I’m honored that Inland has

chosen me as its next chief execu-tive,” he said. “I believe in the mis-sion and goals of the organization and its members and will do all I can to help them thrive in this chal-lenging environment.”

Tom Shaw, CEO of Shaw Media in Dixon, Ill., and head of Inland’s search committee, said the choice of Slaughter was undertaken with due diligence. “Inland is such a great organization, very special to those of us it serves,” Shaw said.

“We have been so fortunate to have enjoyed Ray Carlsen at the helm for more than two decades; but, times are different and the challenges are greater for our industry and our as-sociation, which will require excep-tional leadership from our chief executive. Speaking for myself and the entire search committee, with-out hesitation or reservation, we could not be more pleased that Tom

tom Slaughter named Inland’s executive directorPatty Slusher named Inland’s director of Membership and Programming

By Michelle finkleraSSocIate edItor

While many newspapers are jumping on the bandwagon and partnering with daily deal sites such as Groupon or Liv-ingSocial, the Record-Journal in Meri-den, Conn., has created its own model for offering consumers discounts on goods and services from local busi-nesses.

For the past two and a half years, the Record-Journal has put together Aunt Clara’s Online Store, which sells local businesses’ gift cards to consumers at 30 percent off their face value. The busi-nesses receive the full face value of the cards through advertising dollars at the newspaper.

“We actually got the idea from The Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northamp-ton, [Mass.],” said Carolyn Wallach, assistant managing editor-online/weeklies for the 18,000-circulation daily. “They had an online store that sells gift certificates, and we took that idea and launched our own in October

Who needs Groupon when you’ve got aunt clara?

Slaughter Slusher

aunt clara: contInued on paGe 5

Inland: contInued on paGe 4

twice a year, the record-Journal in Meriden, conn., puts together aunt clara’s online Store, which sells local businesses’ gift cards to consumers at a discounted price. although the store is only open for one week, it is preceded by a month-long Sneak peek pre-Store, which helps create buzz and advertiser interest. IMAgE SuPPlIEd

MARCH 2011 | InlandPress.org | The Inlander PAGE 5

Inland News

2008. We have since run it four more times.”

On average, Wallach said Aunt Clara’s Online Store attracts be-tween 130 and 150 local business-es and brings in $70,000 in revenue for the newspaper each time the store is open, which happens for one week twice a year, in the spring and fall. For the most recent fall 2010 store, 790 orders were placed and 4,360 gift cards were sold, she said.

How Aunt Clara’s is different

Wallach said Aunt Clara’s On-line Store is different from sites like Chicago-based Groupon and Wash-ington, D.C.-based LivingSocial in structure, since Aunt Clara’s gath-ers local merchants in one place, rather than the one-at-a-time ap-proach of daily deal programs. Aunt Clara’s sells gift certificates, while Groupon and LivingSocial offer coupons. Also, sites like Groupon require a minimum num-ber of purchases or the deal is can-celed; Wallach said there is no “tip-ping point” for the gift card deals available on Aunt Clara’s Online Store.

“We sell gift certificates, not coupons,” Wallach said. “The gift certificates are accepted as cash, and they do not expire. The cou-pons offered by daily deal programs are usually more restrictive and do expire. Also, businesses that par-ticipate in Aunt Clara’s receive advertising trade equal to 100 per-cent of the gift certificate face value. This is generally higher than the revenue share offered by daily deal programs.”

Wallach said the Record-Journal doesn’t see these other sites as com-petitors to Aunt Clara’s Online Store, though it does plan to try out a daily deal program in the spring through a partnership with Bounti-ful, Utah-based MatchBin, the ven-dor the newspaper used for its on-line business directory.

“It will not run at the same time as the store,” she said. “Our plan is to implement the program for a month’s worth of daily deals and see how it goes. We look at it as a potential revenue stream that is separate from Aunt Clara’s Online Store.”

Aunt Clara’s Online Store also has a Sneak Peek Pre-Store that opens one month prior to the regu-lar store’s open, and a special sec-tion runs in the Record-Journal promoting the store.

Who is Aunt Clara?

Aunt Clara is a fictional charac-ter originally created by the news-paper for Aunt Clara’s Closet, which was a free classifieds section featuring items for sale under $100, Wallach said.

“We already had an association with Aunt Clara for savings and repurposed her for the new media age,” she said. “We had stopped running the section in classifieds a couple years ago and brought her back for the online store.”

Better-than-expected results

For the first Aunt Clara’s Online Store in October 2008, the newspa-per built the online and shopping cart components for the site in-house, Wallach said. But the de-mand for the gift cards was a bit more than the website or staff could handle, she said.

“The rush on the store was im-pressive,” she said. “It happened so quickly; we can’t process that many orders at once with everyone trying to put gift cards in their cart all at the same time. The first time we did the store, we processed 800 orders with 4,000 gift cards in-house. That was a tremendous task for our staff to handle, and we quickly realized that this wasn’t the best use of our resources.”

After the first store, Wallach said the newspaper brought on a local fulfillment company to manage the pulling and shipping of orders and provide the live inventory count on the website, AuntClarasOnline-Store.com.

Creating a buzz

The Sneak Peek Pre-Store was an initiative launched with the spring 2010 store, Wallach said.

“At the time, we had had three successful stores and we were look-ing for ways to create more buzz around the store,” she said.

The pre-store launches about a month prior to the opening of Aunt Clara’s Online Store and includes the list of participating businesses with gift certificate pricing infor-

mation, such as the full value and discounted purchase price, and a link to the company’s website, she said. Businesses also can become a “featured business” on the pre-store for about $100. Featured businesses receive a bolder listing and tile ad on the Sneak Peek Pre-Store site. For the fall 2010 store, Wallach said 25 businesses par-ticipated in the pre-store as fea-tured businesses.

Customers can’t purchase any-thing from the pre-store, so as a way to bring traffic to the site, Wal-lach said the newspaper created a contest to win a $500 shopping spree. The winner got to choose 10 $50 gift cards from the featured businesses. Internet users could register to win once per day, and the fall 2010 contest had 1,477 en-tries representing 667 different people, she said.

Opening day excitement

Aunt Clara’s Online Store opens at 9 a.m. on a Monday, which Wal-lach said the newspaper has found is a good time for customers to sit at the computer and buy gift cards. During the week, there are an aver-age of 33,000 page views and 3,400 visits to AuntClarasOnlineStore.com, she said.

Customers without Internet ac-cess can call a 1-800 number that the fulfillment company has, though the reps are using the same website as the general public to input the orders, she said. With the last store, Wallach said the company received about 140 calls. The fulfillment company charges a fee per order and per phone call, she said.

After the high demand experi-enced with the first store, the news-paper also decided to limit the num-ber of gift cards purchased from one business to three per order, she said.

“You could still go back in, cre-ate another order and purchase more, but we wanted to give more people more of an opportunity to buy the cards,” she said. “A lot of items sell out in the first 20 min-utes.”

Gift card performance

Selling gift card spots for Aunt Clara’s Online Store is open to all of the Record-Journal’s 11 sales reps, Wallach said. Businesses must

Aunt Clara: Businesses earn advertising dollars through the paperConTInued fRoM PAge 1

To promote the opening of Aunt Clara’s Online Store, which sells lo-cal businesses’ discounted gift cards to consumers, the Record-Journal in Meriden, Conn., publish-es a special section that runs in the newspaper.

“We promote [the store] very heavily in our print products,” said Carolyn Wallach, assistant manag-ing editor-online/weeklies for the daily. “The week before the store, we print a catalog with display ads for each advertiser.”

For the fall 2010 store, the special section came out Nov. 4, four days prior to the store’s opening, she said. The newsprint tabloid was 24 pages and featured ads for each participating business, including gift card pricing information, Wallach said. All of the ads are the same size, but ads from featured businesses in the Sneak Peek Pre-Store ran in color.

Copies of the special section were printed to meet the Re-cord-Journal’s daily circulation of 18,000, she said. The store also was promoted in five of the company’s weekly newspapers by featuring participating businesses in those areas on one or two pages, she said.

More onlineTo view the fall 2010 Aunt Clara’s Online Store promotional

special section as a PDF, visit NBDN-Inland.org and select the “Ideas” tab. When Aunt Clara’s Online Store or Sneak Peek Pre-Store is open, they can be viewed at AuntClarasOnlineStore.com.

Promotional special section

offer at least $1,000 worth of cards to participate, and the required minimum value on each certificate is $25, she said.

Advertising dollars acquired from participation in the store can be used in print or online, with about 90 percent of the dollars go-ing toward print, she said. Also, these acquired advertising dollars must be used during the paper’s “slower periods.” For example, businesses that participated in last year’s fall store, which took place in November, must spend those dollars during January and Febru-ary of 2011.

On average, 77 percent of the gift card inventory is sold, with 52 per-cent sold in the store’s first 20 min-utes and 70 percent sold in the first three and a half hours, Wallach said. The Record-Journal’s graph-ics department prints the gift cards, or businesses can submit their own. Gift cards that are not sold are re-turned to businesses, so they don’t earn those advertising dollars, she said.

“It’s sometimes hit or miss,” she said. “Sometimes businesses that

aren’t well-known in the commu-nity have cards that don’t perform well. Or if certain gift cards are go-ing quickly, people will jump on board just because it’s a popular item. A lot of times, if it’s not sold in the first day, it’s probably not going to sell.”

Wallach said gift certificates to restaurants are popular, as are cards for grocery and liquor stores. An-other popular card is from an oil company offering 30 percent off heating oil. Gift cards that tend to be hit or miss include ones for car dealerships and auto services, she said. Gift cards for hypnosis also haven’t performed well in the past, she said.

Although exact dates for the next store haven’t been determined yet, Wallach said it will be in May with the pre-store launching three to four weeks earlier in April. Planning for the spring store began in February to allow time for the newspaper to make changes or implement new initiatives, she said.

Contact: Carolyn Wallach, cwallach@record-journal.com