Folks in subtropical Naples, Fla., say their town has two seasons: "the tourist season -- and our season."

At the Naples Daily News, that annual cycle translates into the season of working like demons and the season of catching a breath.

Tourists and seasonal residents start trickling into town as summer heat fades into winter warmth. By mid-January, the trickle has become a flood. At its crest, the Daily News circulation department handles hundreds of new home-delivery subscription orders a day. Realtors and merchants trying to reach all these newcomers pour ad after ad into the newspaper, ballooning news hole and production loads to metro newspaper proportions.

Year-round, the trade area has a population of 172,000 people, but "in season," when the snowbirds come streaming down from the north, the number of residents grows to more than 257,000. Some days the newspaper will take 1,000 subscription voluntary starts, an event that taxes both customer service reps and carriers.

The first reports of tulips in Pennsylvania or apple blossoms in Canada start turning the flow the other way. Within a few weeks after Easter, Naples is back to its community core -- and the Daily News is back to the more normal challenge of growing faster than its market.

Newspaper people often envy the Daily News its market. But keeping up with such a market is hard work -- and running ahead of it is a feat. Even though its household penetration is well over 80 percent both daily and Sunday, the Daily News continues to grow faster than investors from around the world can build golf course communities and beach high-rises.

FOUNDED ON LOCAL NEWS AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

The News is not on a growth spree. Its readership success story started 20 years ago, when a Pennsylvania newspaper operator named Corbin Wyant rolled into town. He was seeking a place in Florida to practice his trade -- a place with good prospects. Soon he was running the paper for the Collier family, whose ancestors founded Collier County. The Colliers sold to E.W. Scripps in 1986, and Wyant’s management team stayed in place. By then, nobody was better prepared than they to build readership in Naples.

Like all successful readership builders, they founded the operation on local news and customer service. Then they built higher, adding strong productivity and careful resource allocation to their tool bags.

One of the newspaper’s strengths is that management has experience in the market. Wyant has been at the newspaper for 21 years, the circulation director has been there 18 years, and its advertising director 20 years.

A stroll through the Daily News building with Wyant shows how productivity and resource allocation can amplify a newspaper’s strengths.

In the press room, Wyant points with pride to a glistening Goss Metro line: nine units, double-wide(and bought used for a song. The Daily News press crew helped rebuild and install it. Today, the press runs faster and delivers better reproduction for the Daily News than it did for the previous owner. After selling the old press, Wyant’s total investment was $1.5 million. Many a publisher has spent $30 million for no more press capacity and no better reproduction.

The capital savings made it easier for Wyant to fund cutting-edge telephone equipment in the circulation department -- whose managers reported during the stroll that the new automated system had helped them process more than a thousand subscription starts that day.

AN EASY SELL IS HARD WORK

The Daily News is an easy sell in part because more than 60 percent of the newsroom staff works full-time creating local content: stories, photographs, informational graphics.

Each one of them produces more than the average journalist. High productivity expectations are part of every Daily News employee’s job description. Productivity is discussed in annual evaluations(and the publisher won’t approve any raise until an evaluation has been done.

Wyant is a courtly man, but arguing that there is a tradeoff between productivity and quality would no doubt light a fire in his eyes. He believes they go hand in hand.

Editor Phil Lewis focuses most of his energy on quality. A particular concern of his is the local content mix. He wants the newsroom to give its best efforts to what he calls "franchise issues" -- that is, local issues readers care about most. In Naples, they are: growth, schools, taxes, health care, the arts, golf and high school sports.

Research has shown that the newspaper’s local section edges out the front section for being the most read, with more than 93 percent of readers saying they read those pages regularly. Young people read the local section 13 percent more than the main section.

Naples may be a retirement community, but the entire newspaper, including the newsroom, is going after the young families who also are moving into the city.

Wyant has aimed community sponsorships straight at this target, promoting an in-line skating competition, a junior golf tournament, a high school baseball tournament, pier fishing clinics for youngsters, the county fair and, of course, the annual spelling bee.

Surveys have shown that readers like the newspaper’s reporting -- with 86 percent rating it good overall, and 70 percent giving it excellent ratings for coverage of their local communities.

The circulation department aims a weekend subscription package at busy young families, and a new entertainment section, Showcase, is overrun and stacked up for free distribution at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Quality service is the circulation department’s most important contribution to readership.

At the Daily News, a manager in business attire delivers missed papers within 30 minutes of the complaint call.

Almost all Daily News customers pay the office, and carriers are not allowed to stop a subscription. In fact, stopping is hard for any reason other than death or moving away. Circulation managers work with an unhappy customer and extend a 30-day grace period while trying to prevent a stop.

Carriers get between 20 percent and 22 percent of the retail price. The paper is aggressively priced at $3.85 per week. Carriers are rewarded for good service and fined for bad service such as not double-bagging newspapers on rainy days.

The newspaper pays close attention to its sales at supermarkets, a major source of single-copy revenue. It boosts those sales with strong promotions. The newspaper regularly buys cable television spots and promotes what’s in the next day’s edition.

The Daily News has developed partnerships that allow it to offer subscribers extra benefits. One program gives new readers restaurant discounts when they take a three-month subscription.

The newspaper is flexible. If readers want to be billed monthly, it’s no problem. The reader decides how he or she wants to be billed. If a reader wants to be billed monthly, it’s no problem.

The newspaper’s success also is measured in its advertising market dominance. Despite aggressive pressure from Yellow Pages, a neighboring daily in Fort Myers and a variety of real estate publications, the Daily News remains the prime source for advertising in the marketplace.

Hard-working, quality- and customer-oriented people deliver readership growth for the Daily News. Corbin Wyant offers one hint to newspaper managers who yearn for such people: Learn to hire them.

"If we’re good at anything," he says, "we’re good at selecting the right people."

SIDEBAR: AN OLD WEAPON FOR A NEW MEDIA ERA

(Every winning newspaper in this study has a seamless relationship with its community. Perhaps the most visible newspaper in that regard is the Daily News, where the charge is led by Publisher Corbin Wyant. We asked Wyant to give his views on the importance of a newspaper’s involvement with its community.)

By Corbin Wyant

The degree to which newspapers are involved with their communities in the competitive environment of the next decade will largely determine those that flourish and those that languish. Editors and publishers are good at giving lip service to local news coverage as their franchise, but a close look at their products and the involvement of their newspapers in their markets frequently doesn't reflect that commitment.

The urgency of a newspaper's involvement with its community is as old as the press system of our nation. Only the technology changes. One might argue, for example, that a newspaper truly committed to serving its community and its readers, must already be serving up information in whatever form the reader wants it, print or electronic.

The three fundamentals of a newspaper's being involved with the community in which it publishes are:

1. Devote the resources to covering local news comprehensively, accurately and objectively. If you are a metropolitan newspaper and the minutiae is overwhelming, then you should be zoning editions or publishing regional supplements. If you don't provide strong local coverage to your readers in the coming decade, someone else will. If you're a smaller paper, don't despair that you have a limited staff. You have a far more concentrated target. If your small staff is really productive, you can give your readers local news coverage of reasonable quality better than any well-staffed metro in the country.
2. Be a part of your community. Have a presence in your market, a big one that brands your newspaper with its market. No other institution can do it the way you can. At the Daily News we sponsor fishing contests, spelling bees, and scholastic sports competitions. We give an outstanding citizen award, honor community volunteers, and offer cooking schools. We conducted a gun safety program along with law enforcement agencies and offered free trigger locks to gun owners.
3. Promote and market your newspaper. Celebrate your newspaper's presence in the community. Use a generous amount of in-paper advertising (it works well for your advertisers; it will work well for you), and then find the best vehicles in your market to reach non-readers.

Get involved personally in appropriate causes in your community, and encourage your staff to do so. Make a lot of speeches. If you're not comfortable doing so, join Toastmasters and learn how. The public expects you to be informed and interesting, and the speaking circuit is second only to the columns of your newspaper as an effective way to communicate with your readers.

Personal involvement in appropriate community activities is productive. The more remotely located it is away from the golf course, the better. Non-editorial staffers at the Naples Daily News are especially encouraged to be involved in community activities, but they are precluded from having any publicity or fund-raising responsibility. In selected areas they are identified as representing the newspaper in the activity.

Editorial employees are more restricted for the obvious reason that their involvement in civic activities can be perceived by readers as a possible conflict of interest with to balanced news coverage. There are still plenty of appropriate roles that are being filled by editorial employees of the newspaper in literacy efforts, humanitarian causes such as Hospice and Habitat, even a foundation dedicated to honoring excellence in public education.

For a promotional activity that really strikes a chord with readers, you can't beat the band, The Naples Daily News band. Composed of adult musicians uniformed in the newspaper's white and blue colors with a prominent logo on the tunic, the band is immensely popular in the frequent parades conducted year-round in this market.

In the five years of its existence, the band has appeared before parade crowds totaling over a million spectators. To qualify to play in the band, says the newspaper, you must either be an employee or reader of the Daily News. With the highest circulation penetration of its market of any newspaper in the nation, the talent pool for the Daily News band is extensive. In addition to the marching band, a traditional jazz band is appearing frequently this year, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the newspaper's founding. The Dixieland jazz group plays tunes mostly written in 1923, the year the newspaper was started, by composers such as Louis Armstrong and King Oliver. Audiences among the heavily retired population of our market have enthusiastically received the energetic Dixieland music of the jazz band.

The first 75 years of publication of the Naples Daily News have been spectacular, and the past 25 years of product improvement along with circulation and advertising growth have been, in all likelihood, unprecedented. The successes of the next 25 years, we believe, will be determined by our continuing to enhance our coverage of the market and by our ability to make a little noise while doing so.