Switch - Chip Heath [129]
What’s the explanation for this remarkable success? The people of Dunn certainly have plenty of options for their news: USA Today, the Raleigh News & Observer, CNN, the Internet, and hundreds of other outlets. So why is the Daily Record so popular?
The Dunn Daily Record was founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams. Adams was born with ink in his blood. He got his first byline by sending dispatches from his Boy Scout camp. By the time he was in high school he was serving as a stringer—a freelance reporter—for the Raleigh paper. After World War II, Adams became the editor of the Dunn Dispatch. Eventually, he grew restless at the Dispatch and decided to start his own paper, the Daily Record. In 1978, after twenty-eight years of head-to-head competition, the Dispatch finally gave up and sold out to him.
Across the fifty-five years of his tenure as publisher, Adams has had a remarkably consistent editorial philosophy. He believes that newspapers should be relentlessly local in their coverage. In fact, he’s a zealot about community coverage.
In 1978, frustrated by what he felt was insufficient focus on local issues in the paper, he wrote a memo to his staff, explaining his views:
“All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else. Always remember, the mayor of Angier and the mayor of Lillington are just as important to those towns as the mayor of New York is to his people.”
Let’s be clear: Adams’s focus on local coverage is not a revolutionary sentiment. In fact, among publishers of small newspapers it would be utterly uncontroversial. Yet it’s easy enough to see that the idea has not become a reality at most papers. The average local newspaper is loaded with wire stories, analyses of pro sports teams, and spot photos with nary a person in sight.
In other words, finding the core isn’t synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can know what the priorities are but be completely ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities. Adams has managed to find and share the core. How did he do it?
Sharing the Core
Adams found the core of his newspaper operations: local focus. Then he turned his attention to sharing his core message—making it stick with his staff. For the rest of the chapter — in fact, the rest of the book—we will discuss ways to get core messages to stick. And we will start by studying the way Adams has made his “local focus” message stick.
While many publishers pay lip service to the value of local focus, Adams is an extremist about it. He’s willing to hurt the bottom line for local focus:
The fact is, a local newspaper can never get enough local names. I’d happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition of each paper if we had the names to fill them up.
He’s willing to be boring for local focus:
I’ll bet that if the Daily Record reprinted the entire Dunn telephone directory tonight, half the people would sit down and check it to be sure their name was included.… When somebody tells you, “Aw, you don’t want all those names,” please assure them that’s exactly what we want, most of all!
He gleefully exaggerates in order to emphasize the value of local focus, quoting a saying of a friend, Ralph Delano, who runs the local paper in Benson:
If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson.
In fact, asked why the Daily Record has been so successful, Adams replies, “It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names.”
What’s going on here? Adams has found the core idea that he wants to communicate—that local focus is the key to his newspaper’s success. That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to communicate the core to others. And he does that brilliantly.
Look at the techniques Adams uses to communicate his seriousness about local focus. He uses an analogy: comparing the mayor of Angier to the mayor of New York. (We’ll have