Mike Peterson of the Post-Star in Glens Falls, NY, shared his method for making major changes to his comics pages. In his case, he swapped out a full THIRD of his comics. And he received less than a dozen complaints.
Mike and his staff started by explaining that they would be making some major changes but that they didn’t want to cancel something readers REALLY cared about or keep something they DIDN’T care about.
At the time, the paper ran 22 strips, but they only put 21 up for discussion because one was drawn by a “local” cartoonist and they knew they didn’t want to drop that strip.
- They divided the 21 strips into three categories: Old Favorites, Social Commentary and Modern Life.
- They then asked readers to pick the ONE strip they would most miss and the ONE strip they’d most like to see dropped in EACH category.
- They asked for the readers’ age, where they lived and how often they read the paper.
- Then they weighted the responses toward the younger readers (who they were trying to attract and who, at that time, didn’t have a lot to interest them on the pages). They also allowed online voting, which, the editor admits, would be more difficult to control (for ballot stuffing) nowadays.
As surveys go, this paper did very well, getting 1,500 responses (4.3 percent of their circulation). Mike and his staff looked for trends, both across the board age- and gender-wise and also for particularly strong or weak strips in particular demographic categories.
The result: They dropped 6 strips and picked up 7 (making room in another section for the additional strip). They discovered that “freshening” their pages also had other benefits. They got substantial cost savings. Mike explained, “We were eager to make changes that would increase our appeal to new readers and brand our Sundays. We were pleasantly surprised to find that our changes also represented a substantial savings for the newspaper.”
Perhaps the most important part of Mike’s plan was “damage control.” As he puts it, “Because we had not over-promised readers control of the changes or allowed them to second-guess our decisions by running ‘results,’ and because we structured changes to only eliminate strips with few real fans, we managed to make our changes with fewer than a dozen complaints from readers. To put it another way, each complaint reflected more than $1,000 in annual savings.”
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Now that you ’ve figured out which comics to drop from your pages, it’s time to add new ones! But making a straight substitution – one old family strip for another new family strip, for instance – can be problematic. Readers will figure out your “straight swap” strategy and hold it against the new strip.
Try a strip that’s getting “buzz” or that speaks to a group that’s missing from your pages. This is, after all, your chance to grab NEW readers while serving your loyal base.
And if you don’t want to commit fully, you can always turn to the Guest Comic Rotation idea after your survey; it’s especially useful if you’re unconvinced about one or two of your new choices.
Another source is (gasp!) the various syndicate sales reps who haunt you. Ask them to look at your pages and tell you what’s missing. And if a rep suggests a strip from a competing syndicate, then you know you’ve got a rep who’s interested in customer service, not just sales.
Whether your paper is anti-survey or you’re just looking for a different approach, you can still find creative and proactive ways to reach demographics that you know don’t answer surveys. Here are a few ideas:
- If your paper is an NIE participant, send a staffer or intern to participating schools and ask students what comics they read in the paper now, what they read outside the newspaper (i.e., on the Web or in books), and what comics would make them fans of the newspaper’s comic page. You can also bring samples of some new comic strips you are considering for their age group and find out which ones they like.
- Ask a local movie theater advertiser if the paper can pass out a short survey for moviegoers to fill out while they’re waiting for the movie to start. With a captive (and bored) audience, you’ll have a good chance at getting some thoughtful feedback. As an added incentive, the theater could award a free ticket to one survey respondent picked at random.
- If your paper has a “comics committee,” include some non-newspaper staff. Put a notice in the company newsletter that friends and family of staffers are encouraged to give feedback on new comic strips each month. Then you can take the syndicate kits you've received in the last 30 days and pass them out to the volunteers
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