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Show Cr Here's a chance to read about you And this is the strong point of a newspaper - you may skip over something that deeply interests your spouse, and everybody is happy. Newspapers can provide something for everyone. However, knowing all of this makes it even harder to be a newspaper editor. After all, 70 percent of you rely on this newspaper to inform you about local elections. That's a big responsibility, respon-sibility, one we take very seriously. As a reader, you are not just interested in-terested in the news. Most of you rely on this newspaper as your main source of advertising for grocery stores, fast food restaurants, clothing and hardware stores -everything you shop for. The survey results show that our readers use the newspaper for lots of 'Fie things. How about our non- readers?As mentioned before, they tend to be younger than readers, and to have lived in the area for a shorter time. ta. And only 55 percent of the non- subscribers voted in the last city election. So there you are, dear reader. Ini nutshell, you care about vyta! happening in your community. Yt have a sense of commitment to yi town, you feel like a part of what! going on and you take the time to the things that support the con- munity, like vote. And that's ok reason you take the communi? newspaper. , made t I hope you find it informative a interesting as well. i And I'm glad I'm getting to kU you better. I W.Cen Hello. Yes, I'm talking to you. The typical reader of our local newspaper. For almost four years I've been telling you more about myself than I should have. Sometimes, I've even told the truth. But it's always been a shot in the dark, so to speak. I mean you knew who I was. And I knew who I was. But I didn't know who you were. Well, now I understand you a little better, thanks to a survey we recently ran. We asked some questions we'd been wanting to know for a long time - and we got some answers. Not just about you, but about the guy who passes over this column every week - over a fourth of the people who" pick up the newspaper. And about the guy who doesn't subscribe to his hometown newspaper at all. First of all, about you. Most of you own your own home, are registered voters and 83 percent of you voted in the last city election. Most of you, about 80 percent, have lived in your current home for over six years, and 33 percent of you have lived there for over 20 years. The average reader has lived in his or her home for 15.8 years - almost seven years longer than the average non-reader. And most of you have children living at home. (They like to read our paper, at least part of it, too. ) The survey showed that you come in all ages, so I can't tell you how old you are. But our average reader is about 10 years older than the non-reader. non-reader. We found that a lot of our subscribers sub-scribers are senior citizens, and almost 30 percent are retired, but a lot of young people read the paper as well. In fact, we average about 3.3 readers per copy of the newspaper. Most of you read the paper each week - and most of you spend more than 16 minutes with the paper. In fact, most of our readers pick up their paper more than once. What do you read when you pick up the newspaper? Well, before you got here, you spent some time with the editor's By MAKC If 1 HADDOCK the front page. And many of you read the editorial - more than will read this column. That is good news. I've always felt the editorial was important, but there are times when it seems like no one reads it. Most of vou do. You also read any letters-to-the-editor that happened to be on this page, in fact, those letters are the fourth best read feature in the newspaper, after the front page, the society section and the obituaries. If anyone has an opinion they would like to express, the letter-to-the-editor is an excellent place, because it will be very well read. After the editorial page, your next stop is the society pages, where we list weddings, missionaries and community events. Almost everyone reads the society pages at one time or another. Obituaries are almost as well read as the society pages. Then, according to our survey, readers scatter to their areas of interest. There are devoted readers of the sports pages, the comics, the television listings and the classified ads. But not everyone spends time with these sections of the paper. |