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Umbrellas have been a great promotional tool for boosting TMT's subscriptions.

Jerry Rives has been Circulation Director at the Tyler Morning Telegraph in Tyler, TX, since 1990. "Best move I ever made in my life," he says. "You don't find many circulation directors who have been lucky enough to stay 16 years at one newspaper. It's like being a professional football coach. If you win you're great; if you lose you're out. It's just that simple." Brainfood talked to Jerry to find out about his winning formula.

So how do you build a successful career at one newspaper in such a "what have you done for me lately" business?

For starters, you need the right environment for success.

We're a family-owned newspaper and we see everybody everyday. It's not like we just meet in a boardroom once a year. So there are no surprises and no beating people over the head.

Most of our management team has been here for years, which is just not normal in the newspaper business. Our vice president of advertising has been here for 14 yrs. The guy who is over our advertising computer system has been here 37 years. Our editor has been here 17 years. Our general manager has been here 19 years.

With that kind of continuity, the main thing you have to do is set up a good relationship with the other departments, especially advertising and editorial and production. We really work hard at being a team with those departments. We lunch together on a routine basis. We play together on a routine basis. We know what the other is doing. I believe that helps us all be a lot more effective.

How so?

Well, if something's coming up in tonight's paper the editorial department will be over here by one or two o'clock and telling me about it so that I can bump up single copy distribution in zones where the story will be of particular interest. We might increase as much as 10 percent, depending on how big the story is.

And the production department works with us too. We can call up at midnight and say 'Hey, we got something just happening. Add some papers to these routes,' and they take care of it. Maybe there are 5 routes in an area that the story would pertain to or be of particular interest to. Until carriers leave our back dock, we can increase their draw.

Can you tell us a little about your market?

We're about 90 miles out of Dallas. Their NDM bumps right up to Smith County, which is our NDM. So we've got the Dallas Morning News in our market. They're hot on our heels all the time, but I don't really see them as a competitor. They do have a good product, though, and I'm sure they take some of our readers.

Our main competition is the electronic media. From the '90s until just the last year or so our circulation has shown slight increases year after year. Then in the last 24 months we've kind of hit a wall like everyone else. The Internet seems to be impacting us. We're now measuring the hits on our Website and trying to determine the best way to handle online subscriptions. We've got a debate going on about that right now.

When you look at print in combination with electronic our circulation has actually gone up pretty nicely in the last couple of years. It's just tough to measure and really claim from an auditing standpoint.

We know the readership is there, though. I think maybe the smaller, medium sized papers like ours are a bit behind the curve on that. We're more local and it takes a little longer for some of these trends to get into the smaller communities.

What are some of the things you're doing to maintain print sales?

The one thing that we've done here that works better than anything we've found is an umbrella as a premium for a subscription. That seems real simple and rudimentary. But we don't simply buy our umbrellas. We actually build panels from existing front pages and section fronts.

We'll build localized panels. There are eight of them on each umbrella, and we go through back issues and pick out the highlights of the year and build the panels with stories. We get as many local names and pictures as we can in it.

I've been using umbrellas since 1990, and they're still just as effective. And the two things I attribute that to are: First, we won't sell them. The only way to get one is to buy a subscription. And second, we revise the content every year to keep them interesting. Several other newspapers have tried the umbrella idea with off-the-shelf products and people think they are pretty. Ours is not just pretty, it's unique, and that's what makes it work.

When do you use the umbrella promotion, during the holidays?

No, the umbrella is big year round. For example, each September we do a booth at the East Texas State Fair, and we'll go through as many as fifteen hundred umbrellas within that one week.

Then we do promotions throughout the year... for things like 'April showers.'

Another thing we're in the process of looking at, since we're on the topic of promoting the print product, is what can we remove and replace with more local names, local stories, local photos. We think that will boost our rack sales, and we're promoting it on the front page of the Sunday paper by indicating local features for the upcoming week.

Do you anticipate any significant changes in 2006?

For the past 5 months we've been working on transitioning to CircSmartTM, Brainworks' new circulation management system. This will be my third system install and we're just about ready to go live on CircSmart. I can tell you, this is the most excited I've been in a long time about a circulation software package. I really like the mapping part of it because I've bought third party mapping software before but I've never been able to make it work for us.

I saw a demo at last year's Nexpo and, as I said, the mapping caught my eye and we started talking a little. I had known Jeff Collison, the CircSmart product manager, from other places and I was familiar with him and knew what his capabilities were. The CircSmart system wasn't something they were just beginning to develop; it was already in use in more than fifty papers in New Zealand and Australia. We've also had the Brainworks advertising package since 1999, so we just had a lot of confidence going in.

Right now, with most systems, if you want to realign a carrier route, it's pretty cumbersome. And with the system I've got especially, it takes a heck of a lot of work to do a simple thing like realign the boundaries that a carrier works in. Say you have a new subdivision that borders an existing route and you want to include that subdivision in the route. With CircSmart you just click on the boundary line, drag it, and it's done. All of the people that live in that new subdivision are now on that route.

In the past we had to go in and move every subscriber, one by one. It just took a lot of time and provided a lot of room for error. If the data entry clerk didn't understand the ABC zones and that sort of thing, they might apply the wrong zone. Then your Paragraph Three with ABC comes out incorrect and one thing just leads to another. A lot of that is going to be eliminated with this new CircSmart system. And that's just one application.

Would you like to offer any words of advice to new circulation managers?

When it comes to circulation, everyday is a battle. Think long and hard before you get into the circulation department, because it's a tough game. But in my opinion it's probably the most fun because I like change and that's one thing you can count on in circulation.