As this issue’s lead story demonstrates, more and more newspapers are looking to audience-development executives to lead the way in mapping strategy, researching markets and creating new products for underserved audiences. Here are short profiles of three leaders charged with this mission, excerpted from a longer white paper. To read the entire publication, go here.

Growth, by the Numbers

Edwina Blackwell Clark

When Edwina Blackwell Clark was named Cox Ohio Publishing’s senior vice president of audience in summer 2006, her goal was to create a dozen new products. She is well on her way, in part by focusing on 937 and 513.

Those southwestern Ohio area codes covered by the group’s four dailies and six weeklies are helping to brand new niche sites targeted at parents and pet lovers – 937Moms.com, 513Moms.com, 937pets.com and 513pets.com. Swocol.com is geared toward students at the region’s colleges. A monthly business-to-business magazine, matching Web site and e-mail service were scheduled to launch in November.

“We don’t think we can grow our audience reach just with our paid products,” says Blackwell Clark, who oversees the group’s editorial departments and online and marketing divisions.

 “I’m looking for ways to merge editorial content and advertising content so users get a richer experience,” she says. “While that’s an internal divide for us, it’s not a divide for the consumer.”

Another divide, she says, is shifting from focusing exclusively on paid print circulation. “Most of our focus up to this point has been on our readers and our ‘light readers.’ Can we push them into being heavy readers? … We need to be more nimble and responsive, and clearly more focused on online.”

Commuting Sentences

Stuart Shinske

When Stuart Shinske returned to the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal in December 2006 after an earlier tenure as its deputy city editor, news editor and managing editor, he was given a dual title: executive editor/director of content and audience development.

Audience development had been part of his previous role as executive editor of another smaller-market daily and had been a focus of his predecessor in Poughkeepsie. But the new title “formalized it,” he says.

“Editors used to create products and then run them by readers, get feedback and keep going,” Shinske says. “Now, we’re really embracing audience in everything we do – in the approach we take on stories, in editing decisions and in trying to highlight the things we know our readers are looking for.”

In Poughkeepsie, a growing Hudson River community 90 minutes by train from New York City, that includes a focus on commuting information: a weekly column by a commuter, a widget to pinpoint the cheapest gas stations and online traffic updates.

Making this and other projects work has meant building-wide training and considerable newsroom discussion. “Our front-line editors are much more attuned to key audiences,” Shinske says.

Driving Editorial Change

Dwayne Yancey

As The Roanoke (Va.) Times’ senior editor of new channels, Dwayne Yancey comes from a “fairly conventional reporter-editor past” with 25 years at the paper. But he always had been “the new projects guy,” working with cross-departmental teams whenever a section was launched or revamped and playing key roles in online initiatives.

His new role, Yancey says, “is recognition that if we’re going to do these things, we’d better be serious about them.”

His mandate is to create intensely local coverage, build databases for enterprise reporting and develop interactive online tools.

To help generate hyperlocal coverage, Yancey supervises the editor leading the Times’ community news team, which produces a zoned tabloid. He oversees the newsroom librarian, whose job already was evolving into enterprise research, and a data-delivery editor who will acquire and implement databases for reporting and Web use.

Along with an extensive survey of all competitors within the market, Yancey is studying local population shifts and matching them with circulation trends, something “no one in news has done before,” he says.