One report card the other day showed 61 percent of respondents reading some or all of a sidebar that appeared on an inside page. This compared favorably with 47 percent who reported reading any items on the Sports section-front that day. Readers like to talk Daily customer feedback, we ve discovered, can be a stimulating experience. Recruiting, too, has gone well. Many readers have been very excited about doing it and pleased to be asked, says Wendy Zomparelli, the publisher s assistant who headed the team that set up the report card.
Readers appear to genuinely enjoy grading the newspaper.
One even volunteered to buy a Touch-Tone telephone so she could participate. The report card provides more than continuous, albeit unscientific, feedback. It is intended to develop over time a statistically valid database on how readers use the newspaper. The idea is to survey, in a year, about 20 groups of 50 readers each. When they re recruited, participants also are asked demographic and attitudinal questions, answers to which are added to the database for possible correlations.