The idea behind Circulation Winners, a new report from the ‘Shaping the Future of the Newspaper’ project of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), is simple: examine 18 of the world’s fastest-growing newspapers and share the secrets of their success.
Other newspapers in the study include: Aftonbladet (Sweden); Avvenire (Italy); Daily Mail (United Kingdom); Le Dernière Heure/Les Sports (Belgium); Het Parool (The Netherlands); Irish Daily Star (Irish Republic); The Irish Times (Irish Republic); Kleine Zeitung (Austria); Komsomolskaya Pravda (Russia); Der Landbote (Switzerland); El Mundo (Spain); Posta (Turkey); Rheinische Post (Germany); Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany); Le Télégramme (France); VG (Norway); and Zero Hora (Brazil).
The report cites 10 factors that drive circulation success:
– Take the long view: Focus on the long-term success of the business, and regard circulation growth as the factor that drives every other aspect of the business.
– Have a clear definition. Get to know the audience: what kind of people they are, both in their physical sense but also in terms of their needs, interests and aspirations.
– Be the best. Take the best stories to market before the competitors, employ the best people, and be prepared to pay more to keep them and motivate them.
– Gain circulation today, profit tomorrow. Be prepared to sacrifice short-term profits to secure circulation stability.
– Integrate. Work as a team and share the common goal of building circulation.
– Treat readers as customers. Give the customers what they want. Good journalists don’t write for themselves; they write what their readers want to read.
– Hire young journalists. A steady flow of young journalists rejuvenates content and challenge the older staff.
– Target all age groups. The population in mature newspaper markets is ageing and successful newspapers provide content accordingly. Advertisers also regard mature readerships very highly.
– Attract women readers. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the project was the high proportion of female readers in what was long considered to be a male dominated business.
– Fate may play a hand. All circulation winners had a moment of truth. For many of them, a do-or-die decision forced them to change course, to think differently and radically, and it was on the basis of the decisions made at the time that the newspaper flourished.
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