A few years ago The Bridgeport Post, as it was called then, was fighting for survival. But today, Bob Laska, Rick Sayers and Phil Hudson are pleased. Things are going well at the Post. They have succeeded, respectively, as the Post’s publisher, editor and circulation director by doing one not-so-simple thing: embracing change.

It started just as the decade began. Then-publisher Dudley Thomas recognized that his newspaper’s city, Bridgeport, was in an advanced state of decline. His readers were fleeing to the suburbs, leaving the Post behind. Bridgeport was dying, and so was the Post.

"Dud," as everyone calls him, grabbed a 600-person organization by the lapels and shook hard. In less than 24 months, he consolidated an AM/PM operation into a morning-only paper, made suburban coverage the newspaper’s strategic focus, reduced staff by nearly 225 and changed the newspaper’s name from The Bridgeport Post to the Connecticut Post.

Today, the survivors who helped him accomplish this upheaval are managing one of the newspaper industry’s readership success stories -- but the picture is still not perfect.

Readers are still fleeing Bridgeport. The Post lost 1,000 Bridgeport readers in 1997, but the Post is consistently building household penetration by replacing every lost city reader with a suburban reader -- and, for good measure, a few more.

HARD WORK AND LISTENING HARD

People at the Post credit aggressive marketing, devout customer service, and a generous measure of local news coverage that is carefully tuned to the rhythms of New England town life. Talk to anyone who works there, and you will hear a consistent message: The Post listens to its readers and it gives them what they want.

An assistant managing editor calls every reader who has complained to customer service about the news product. Reporters’ phone numbers are published with their stories, and they use the resulting calls for story ideas.

Suburban reporters stick around after town hall meetings to hear what citizens think about their handling of local issues. The publisher likes to prowl local cafes on Saturday mornings to find out what people are reading.

The Post uses some market research, but not as much as most newspapers its size. The daily, routine culture of listening to readers is the core of its research -- and every employee contributes..

Over the decade, reader feedback has helped the Post refine its strategy. The early 1990s revolution produced a single edition covering most of Fairfield County and parts of neighboring New Haven County. But this is a diverse community. A short drive can whisk you from the town of Fairfield’s Range Rover ambiance to Bridgeport’s tough, ethnic neighborhoods to the evolving town of Shelton with its bustling industrial park that overlooks crumbling mills beside the river below.

It is a New England community, or a series of them, where life revolves around the town, and every town fiercely protects real or imagined differences.

As the Post chased Bridgeport readers into the countryside with an A section stuffed with local news, readers told the Post to focus more on their chosen towns. There now are three daily zones, with most of the A section remade for each. The newest, the Valley Edition, reaches across the Housatonic River into New Haven County, serving readers who might once have taken the now-defunct Ansonia Sentinel. The other two zones are for southern Fairfield County west of the Housatonic and southern New Haven County east of the river.

Reporters close to the Post’s suburban readers believe more zoning may be needed in the future. Management is open to the idea but wants to absorb the Valley effort before taking on another. Most of the Post’s 1998 readership growth was expected to come in the Valley.

SERVICE WITH PASSION

Phil Hudson, circulation director, is a passionate man. He speaks so fiercely about his mission that he would frighten a child or timid adult. Ignoring the broken spine of a ring binder that holds his circulation reports, he rips through it looking for examples. To him, each number in the book represents people who must be hunted down, lured into subscribership and coached into a reading habit. People with needs that must be satisfied. People who must be embraced and held tightly within the Post’s family circle.

Hudson is so insistent on getting deliveries right in the first place that he defies conventional circulation wisdom and makes no provision for redelivery if a subscriber is missed. Carriers must do the job right the first time, so redelivery service doesn’t become a crutch for them to lean on. This seems at odds with most industry practices, but the Post benefits from longevity of its well-compensated carriers who are at the front line of service.

Not every Post employee can match the glint in Phil Hudson’s eye. But the sense of readers as family, of readers as people who must be embraced, runs throughout the organization. This is why the Connecticut Post is beating the American trend of declining newspaper readership.

SIDEBAR: A BLUEPRINT FOR GROWTH

As the Post drives ever deeper into its outlying areas, it wields several simple but powerful techniques:

• Get the newspaper to people before they leave for work -- and do it every morning.

• Give customers choices: seven-day delivery, Thursday through Sunday, Friday through Sunday, Sunday only -- and be willing to consider even more.

• Listen to readers and respond. If someone asks for pee-wee soccer scores, do it. If someone else asks for step-by-step instructions to new tuition tax credits, fax the instructions -- then put them in the paper the next time the subject comes up. If young people are crazy about comic books, print the Sunday comics in a book instead of on broad sheet pages. If women think men have a section of their own (sports), give them a women’s section -- and call it that.

• Don’t study problems forever. Just solve them and move on.

• Work together. Expect teamwork and dedication to common goals -- from the top of the organization down..

• If local news is what justifies the newspaper’s existence, then devote as many people, resources and available newsprint to local news as possible -- and put it in the front of the newspaper.

• If the readers are moving to the suburbs, move reporters and circulators to the suburbs, too. Move the best people. Make bureaus and satellite, circulation centers important assignments.

• Be willing to pay for circulation growth. Local news is labor-intensive. Every circulation order comes with a cost. At The Post, circulation churn is considered an investment -- part of the cost of growth.

• Be fanatical about service.