"I've learned how to pick out the tasks that are vital to the business and make them my own special responsibilities," a successful newspaper publisher once said, "by setting up a sort of yardstick to judge every job that comes along.
"My paper was in the 'red' when I bought it. It was a weak sister. It carried the least advertising, had the least circulation and exercised the least influence. Today its lineage is nearly one-third more than its nearest competitor's—and circulation has more than doubled in four years, so now it tops all the rest.
"I analyzed my job something like this: I bought the paper because I thought I could make money with it. To make money, I must carry a large volume of advertising. To get advertising, I must show results to advertisers. To show results, I must make my paper a real "home" paper—a paper really read and appreciated—not merely a paper with which people are only satisfied. To get that kind of circulation, I must put into the paper what people who read a paper at home wouldn't 'miss for anything.'
"What did this analysis show me? Simply this: That while more advertising and more circulation meant more profits, the attitude of my readers toward their paper meant even more—it meant business life or death.
"So my yardstick is never to let anything get by me that might change our standing with our readers. The toughest business problem is shoved aside when something comes up that means loss of respect among our public.
"I made it my first business to get to know our type of reader. Never was a good hand at guessing. So had to learn about human nature.
"After a lot of hiring and firing, picking and sorting, coaching and drilling, I got me four women who could go out and get exactly the kind of information I had to have.
"Each of the four took a section of the city. Each section represented a distinct type of home-dweller—and it takes all kinds of people to run a world, you know—or to buy a newspaper.
"Every week those four women canvassed close to a thousand homes between them. Their method was to tell the housewife that we were going to deliver our paper free for a week—and hoped they'd take it in and read it. A week later they went back over the same ground, soliciting subscriptions, of course, but also gathering information for me.
"More important than getting a subscription was finding out why a woman subscribed—or why she wouldn't subscribe. They asked what the women thought about certain special features.