The parking lots are full of customers at 1,400 restaurants, at the malls and at new retail clusters like Barefoot Landing and Broadway on the Beach. They are full at Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Café, at theaters featuring the Rockettes, the Gatlin Brothers and an Elvis impersonator. They are full at nearly 100 golf courses and at hotels lining 50 blocks of beachfront along Ocean Blvd.

The lot also is full at The Sun News. There, 265 employees not only keep up with exploding population growth, they outrun it. Their secrets? Teamwork and a single-minded focus on customer satisfaction.

Their news, marketing and circulation skills are sophisticated for a small daily -- and their new publisher has news for them: They are going to become even more sophisticated.

Most newspaper teams could do well in a vibrant market like Myrtle Beach. But only a team that has evolved beyond industry norms could build readership as effectively as the team at The Sun News.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• Household penetration: 63 percent daily, 77.6 percent Sunday
• Read-yesterday: 63 percent daily, 70 percent Sunday -- up 5 points and 6 points respectively in the last two years
• Reader satisfaction: 89 percent rating The Sun News as good or excellent.

A PAPER PREOCCUPIED WITH TEAMWORK

When you ask people at The Sun News how these numbers were achieved, the word you hear over and over is "teamwork." Team-building has been a serious preoccupation at The Sun News for eight years, starting under the leadership of Publisher Paula Ellis’ predecessor, Michael Pate.

Pate introduced formal teamwork training, then used teams drawn from every department to improve on-time performance, to combat stops and to create new products.

By 1997, Pate’s teamwork exercises had gone so well that every employee was invited to a strategic planning meeting conducted at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center. They came by the scores, and there the idea for The Beach was born.

The Beach, a single-copy edition aimed at tourists, exemplifies the power of teamwork in building readership. Here are key characteristics of The Beach team’s effort:

• Every department was represented on the team.

• The team was empowered to make decisions from the ground up. As one team member wryly noted, this cut down on mistakes made by isolated senior managers.

• The team was sheltered from bottom-line pressure. This proved to be a mistake.

• The team was able to turn the organization on its ear. It rethought the entire single-copy distribution pattern and even rethought the project’s geographic target, adding the highway corridor along which tourists flow.

• The team didn’t start something and disband. It continues as a sort of board of directors for The Beach. Just months after the publication’s launch, the team was considering a page one redesign. Most recently, it was handed the challenge of restructuring the project financially.

Progressive as this may seem, the newspaper’s new publisher is thinking even farther down the teamwork path. She’s even looking for new language.

"Terms like ‘team’ and ‘task force’ are old language," she says. To Ellis, today’s concept of people serving on a "team" is that they start something, "then they hand off the sustaining to the suits."

Ellis thinks the idea of teams must evolve into the idea of cross-functional employee groups starting, growing and managing lines of business and meeting bottom-line responsibilities.

She’s not the only publisher in America thinking that way, but she may be the publisher in the best position to act on the thought.

NOT ALL READERS ARE ALIKE

One reason for The Beach team’s success was its focus on a specific target: Reach the tourist market.

The newspaper breaks its market into three reader groups: tourists, part-time residents and full-time residents.

Tourists make up a vastly different community for The Sun News to cover -- a community that newspapers in many tourist towns overlook. Tourists breeze through Myrtle Beach for three- and four-day trips. But the typical tourist has visited before, will come back many times and can become a customer.

Tourists are fairly easy to find. Just look along the beach or at golf resorts. They are in town to play, not to keep up on Myrtle Beach life, and their information needs center around ways to have fun.

Full-time residents are like readers in most newspaper markets: local folks with community ties and a desire for a newspaper that holds them and their community together.

This desire is particularly poignant in a town where visitors (12 million a year) outnumber residents (about 150,000) 80 to1. Ask an outlet mall clerk or a golf villa rental manager about tourism, and you’ll get a happy face and a cheery response. Ask the same Myrtle Beach citizen about finding community within this tidal wave of visitors, and you’ll get a wistful answer about the old days -- or about a hometown somewhere else.

Editor Sue Deans and her staff have responded by pushing out the boundaries of local news -- redefining it from stories about institutional problems and the people who cause them to stories about life in the community and the people who make it rich with human worth. Stories about solutions, stories about inspiration: The Sun News has set aside space for such stories and assigned staff to write them.

Jackie Harder, until recently editor of the micro-local Neighbors sections, treated her job as not just an editing assignment, but a mission to influence the newsroom culture.

"I don’t want Neighbors to be a dumping ground for stuff that’s not good enough" for the daily, she told the case study team. The fact is, Neighbors copy is so good, daily editors sometimes steal it.

Another mission for Harder was helping readers -- many of them newcomers -- find community connections amid rapid growth. No story was too small to help her fulfill this mission.

Her successor, Lenore McKenzie-Morris, hopes to extend Neighbors’ micro content.

Harder said, "The secret to Neighbors’ success is we always say yes" when community people come bearing tidbits of news. "I get so much happy mail . . ."

This is the kind of talk that Managing Editor John X. Miller likes to hear in the newsroom. He has little use for cynical, post-Watergate language.

"We don’t tolerate that language in the newsroom," he says. He and Deans preach personalizing and broadening the news. "There are so many things on people’s minds we don’t know about," Deans says.

The Sun News’ third market segment, part-time residents, is the most elusive. Part-timers’ second homes are sprinkled in with year-round homes and weekly vacation rentals. Part-timers often are tourists on the way to becoming year-rounders. Finding them, understanding them and recruiting them as customers is a complex business.

George, the newspaper’s smiling sun face logo, beams at all three reader segments from about 1,000 shiny yellow news racks. George wears his trademark sunglasses inside single-copy store locations, on billboards and on every page one of The Sun News.

The Sun News may segment its market, but it markets consistently. Getting any group of people to do anything consistently is a challenge. At The Sun News, internal communications and employee inclusion in the most important decisions help pull people together. The minutes of executive-committee meetings and various task forces are posted on bulletin boards. So are financial and circulation performance measures -- with comparisons to other Knight Ridder properties.

It’s all part of building a company with strong teams that communicate well and are constantly focused on the customer, no matter who that customer is.

The next study of success at The Sun News may be called something like "Beyond Teamwork -- Myrtle Beach in the 21st Century."

SIDEBAR: FOR NEWS, TOURISTS HIT 'THE BEACH'

Where do tourists in Myrtle Beach go for news? To The Beach, of course!

This beach is not of the white sand variety, but is composed of newsprint, ink and news aimed at the city’s most temporary residents.

The Beach is a project of a Sun News team charged with increasing sales to tourists by creating a product to meet their needs. Editor Sue Deans says the group was charged with either coming up with a redesign of the front page or coming up with a visitors guide. In the end, the team did both.

Visitors are an important part of the Myrtle Beach economy. They represent a potential $3.5 million in circulation sales, even if they aren’t permanent.

The committee of 18 people spent nearly a year working on The Beach before it debuted in March 1997. Now the project is considered a success -- but a success that has matured enough to require reinvention.

The Beach is a repackaged single-copy product that modifies 2-4 pages from the regular edition. It includes a magazine pullout, every day, that is printed once a week. The Beach is distributed only in tourist areas.

The front and jump pages are different, and sometimes so are sports pages. Deans says local news is not pushed out of The Beach, but it’s rearranged to meet visitors’ needs. Visitors may not care about sewer and water issues, but they do want stories about the weather, traffic, festivals or other local events.

Deans describes the front pages as having a "kind of billboard feeling." It will tease more national sports stories than the city edition, favoring those over the prep scores that local readers want. Special graphics reach out to readers and pull them to the vending box.

The separate edition has created a minor amount of confusion for some residents who might pick up a copy of The Beach, then see it alongside a home-delivered edition. If they call, the newspaper staff points out to them that the information is simply data that has appeared in other editions of the Sun News, but has been reorganized to help visitors. There have been few complaints.

Challenging though it was for The Beach’s creators to break tradition and think about news content and packaging differently, the team now has an even tougher challenge.

Publisher Paula Ellis wonders if the team can’t go beyond a "product response" to the challenge of reaching tourists and look also at how what she calls the newspaper’s "infrastructure" of circulation service and marketing relates to tourists. She wonders if single-copy sales increases of more than 4 percent since The Beach was launched can be attributed to people who want the information it includes or by the packaging or by the convenient new rack and store locations. She wonders whether a better fit can’t be found between The Beach’s readership strategies and advertisers’ need for a pullout that’s printed more than once a week.

Team members say reinventing this child of their collective creativity is hard. A follow-up visit to Myrtle Beach found them somewhere between frustration and solemn determination to make another breakthrough.

Their publisher is asking them to take the entire newspaper operation to a readership target this time -- not just a product. They’re taking the graduate course in newspaper teamwork.

SIDEBAR: LEADERSHIP IS AN OPEN BOOK

Did the company make money last month? Ask any employee at The Sun News, and you’ll find out. That’s because the company’s financial performance numbers are posted each month, telling everyone what the company earned and how it compared to the previous month and the year before.

The very idea of disclosing such information is heresy, even frightening, for most top managers, but Michael Pate -- the former Sun News publisher now running the Democrat in Tallahassee, Fla, -- says it only makes sense.

Pate and other senior managers decided it was time to give front-line managers more decision-making authority. They reasoned that the people closest to the problems could make the best decision on how to solve them.

"The decisions don’t just belong to you," Pate said. They affect everyone.

Top management also realized that to make the best decisions possible, middle managers must fully understand how the company works. So management decided to open the books and post the company’s financial figures on bulletin boards and in memos each month.

"They were shocked, then it was neat," Pate said. Most employees were pleased at the new openness, but some managers had difficulty adjusting from top-down management to team management. Several decided to leave the newspaper to find situations that were more in tune with their management style.

But even those who stayed had some adjusting to do. Pate said it took line and middle managers time to realize that top management was serious about putting them in charge. The turning point came when they were assigned to solve one of senior management’s most vexing problems: deadlines.

The newspaper was experiencing problems because its deadlines were only being met 95 percent of the time. The delays were affecting customer service. Several initiatives attempted by top management simply did not work.

So Pate and others called middle and line managers together, explained the issue and assigned them the job of coming up with a solution. Pate says it took time to get the group started; they kept waiting for management to tell them what to do.

Eventually the group got to work, and the solution they came up with, Pate said, was not unlike what top management was already trying. But this time it worked. "The difference was it was their plan, not ours," Pate said.

This task convinced the company that top management was serious. From that point on, things began to improve. But Pate acknowledges that, even in 1997 when he left for Tallahassee, some employees had not embraced the change.

Change is also on the agenda in Tallahassee, but the approach will be different because the problems and the people are different, Pate said. So far his biggest problem is that people expect change too quickly. "Making that dramatic of a change takes a long, long time and a lot of patience," Pate says.

In Myrtle Beach, communication was a vital part of the change.

Divulging information was important, but management also taught employees how to use the data. The newspaper’s chief financial officer taught middle managers about the numbers that were being released and what they meant. Once they understood the information, the managers passed on the information to rank-and-file employees. Briefings still happen once a month.

Top management did decide to withhold information on exact profits and margins, feeling those were less critical to daily operating decisions.

Pate believes the effort has paid off handsomely. In Myrtle Beach, deadlines are now met more than 98 percent of the time, the newspaper has been steadily growing readership, it has won Knight Ridder’s top prize for business performance three years in a row and is recognized one of the nation’s top 25 newspapers.

The goal of the entire process was to improve the product for the newspaper’s readers. Pate and others also knew that those on the front lines were most aware of the problems and which were the most critical. "By being able to raise those issues, we were able to resolve those issues," he says.