selling the paper

How to go about boosting circulation at the paper? This becomes especially important as do-not-call lists grow in popularity. Without telemarketing, newspapers are going to have to be increasingly creative in reaching the community and attracting and retaining subscribers.

I'd say this is particularly true for community weeklies, which usually lack the name recognition of their metro daily counterparts and rely on healthy circulation numbers to give them clout with advertisers, who of course pay the bills.

Heck, you don't have to convince me that telemarketing calls are annoying as can be. The mortgage companies haven't stopped calling us to refinance our mortage even though we already did more than six months ago. We usually get one a night.

Most small newspapers use telemarketing in conjunction with other means of promotion. For example, a new family moves to town. Their Realtor alerts the local newspaper, which gives the Realtor a discount on advertising, and sends the newcomers a free subscription for their first four weeks. Then, after that four-week period is up, a telemarketer from the newspaper follows through with a call asking if they would like to subscribe for an entire year.

That sort of applied telemarketing is nowhere near as bad as the spam telemarketing most people are familiar with, when a computer dials your number and then connects you with a live person. It's targeted, it's to people already familiar with the product, and it also has a much greater success rate.

No-call lists affect both forms of telemarketing, and for a small-circulation weekly, where every new subscription is important, no-call lists are potentially crushing to the subscription base. I'll be curious to see if there's a First Amendment challenge to the lists. I doubt it would win, in wake of things like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and court cases like the one involving the Hillsborough (N.J.) Beacon about 10 years ago, but I'm sure someone's planning a case against it.

In the meantime, I'm still curious to know what tricks newspapers (and other businesses) have found to get subscribers without using telemarketing. A quality product and word of mouth often AREN'T enough for products with a purely local appeal, especially in a society as disconnected as today's.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that banning door-to-door solicitation is an unwarranted restriction of people's First Amendment rights to free speech. Restrictions on telemarketing also have been struck down for similar reasons; what has been upheld is the public's right to be left alone when they request it, hence the no-call lists and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which guarantees you money if a company fails to honor your no-call request.

On a somewhat unrelated note, after being visited at my house for the fourth time by a cable TV salesman, I called their headquarters and told them the next time one of their representatives came to my door I was suing for harassment and pressing charges for trespassing. They've left us alone ever since.

There are a few regional weeklies with good success rates -- I can think of two here in Central Jersey -- but they're the exception, not the rule. A business succeeds to the extent it defines and fits its niche; I like watermelon, as do millions of other Americans, but AT&T would be crazy to enter the watermelon business. People generally don't buy community weeklies to read about towns other than their own, and when a weekly starts running news about neighboring towns, circulation starts to drop precipitously. I've seen it happen.

And, no, radio and TV ads generally are ineffective for businesses with a local-only appeal. It works for a car dealership, because they can draw customers from all over the broadcast area, but why would someone in Penn Hills, Pa., really care about the local property taxes or schools in Monroeville, Pa.? It has no relevance to them, even though those two municipalities are next to each other.