ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703100053
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: From the Newsroom
SOURCE: WENDY ZOMPARELLI\EDITOR
Imagine, for a moment, that you're in charge of The Roanoke Times. You want to improve the paper to make it more enjoyable for established readers and to attract new ones. What changes will you make?
You know that on a typical day some 250,000 people read your newspaper - each from a different perspective, with diverse ideas about what would make it better. How do you ensure that the changes you make truly reflect the wishes of the greatest portion of your readership?
For nearly three years, we've been wrestling with precisely that question. Last week, we revealed the results of months of research, content development and testing with a new design and some special Thursday features. Other new content will debut in April.
Reader response - your response - will show us whether we got it right.
A new approach
In March 1994, Landmark Communications - the parent company of The Roanoke Times, the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., and Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot - hired Kannon Consulting of Chicago to undertake an ambitious research project. Unlike our previous research, which had focused on demographics and readership of particular items, this research would provide an "attitudinal segmentation" of readers in each of the three markets. The premise: If you study groups of people according to their fundamental attitudes about news and information, you'll know more about how to meet their needs than if you look primarily at their age, income or reading habits.
We asked more than 1,100 randomly selected Roanoke Times readers to tell us how strongly they agreed or disagreed with 75 statements like these:
"One of the roles of the local daily newspaper is to encourage participation in the community."
"I often can't find the time to read the daily newspaper during the week."
"TV news programs are just too short to give you all the information you need about a particular story."
We defined eight reader segments. Two showed high readership and satisfaction with the newspaper, four were moderate, and two were low. We decided to try to make changes that would improve the newspaper from the moderate groups' point of view - without sacrificing anything important to our most satisfied readers.
Tell us what you think
A team from the news, advertising, circulation and marketing departments spent months analyzing the data and the needs of our target group:
They are time-pressed. They like to stay up on current affairs, so they can engage confidently in interesting conversations with friends and co-workers. They want depth in the stories that interest them most, and they want to find those stories quickly and easily. They want to get ahead at work. They value connections with people in the community and see the newspaper as a way to keep in touch.
With that profile in hand, we involved 120-plus news employees in brainstorming content and design ideas. We evaluated the ideas against a matrix, created prototypes of the top-ranked ideas and convened reader panels to examine them. We listened to the responses, threw some ideas out, retooled others and showed them to more readers - until we were ready to show them to you.
We invite you to call our Customer Service Center (981-3211 or 800-346-1234, Ext. 211) to tell us what you think. Sometime this spring, you may get a call from a researcher, asking for your opinions about the changes. We hope you'll take a few minutes to respond, because this story isn't over. In the coming year, we will be using this technique to improve content on other days, in other areas.
And we can't do it without you.
In this new, occasional column, senior editors will talk about how we make decisions in the newsroom and about changes at The Roanoke Times.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 linesby CNB