20 Under 40 - 1995 Profile: Linda A. Effinger

PRESSTIME

By Presstime Magazine

First Published: December 1995

Successful teamwork is more a matter of attitude than technique for two executives at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.

Last year, when the paper increased its single-copy price, Linda Effinger and Debbie Meissner awed the paper's other managers with their joint effort to convert readers from the newsrack to home delivery while retaining determined single-copy buyers, who make up about one-third of each day's circulation.

"A lot of single-copy managers guard their single-copy numbers with their lives" for fear subscriptions will cannibalize single-copy sales, says Meissner, who headed subscription sales at the time. But "for whatever reason, there were never any turf battles between Debbie and me," says Effinger, then in charge of single-copy sales. Their profitable partnership stems from both friendship and a shared outlook that the paper's good is more important than their individual departments.

While toiling to turn single-copy buyers into subscribers, they also recognize the value of strengthening the single-copy market. "We believe, and we are now in the midst of proving, that our single-copy buyers are as consistently loyal and frequent as our home delivery [readers]—they just get [the paper] through a different channel," Effinger says.

Once on the pistol team at Florida State University, Meissner got pretty good at hitting targets. That comes in handy on the job.

In 1992, Meissner directed the paper's first targeted mail solicitation of seasonal residents. Last year, she drew a bead on single-copy readers as the newspaper raised its newsstand price from 25 cents to 35 cents, its first single-copy increase in 16 years. When Effinger and her staff obtained 75,000 names and phone numbers through a single-copy-only contest, Meissner's telemarketing staff called them, pointing out that they could get home delivery for just 26 cents a day. The paper added 5,000 home-delivery subscribers. It also captured valuable information for its consumer marketing database.

Meissner and Effinger say the paper's recent business-side reorganization will boost their teamwork even more. Co-leaders of a circulation database-marketing coordinating committee, they each take on new roles and titles that straddle circulation and marketing functions.

Meissner, as strategic customer-development manager, oversees telemarketing and educational services as well as subscription and single-copy sales. Target marketing remains her game. "We are no longer going to be able to mass market in an industry that has traditionally been mass marketed," she says.

Effinger's task, as consumer-marketing group manager, involves not only sales, but marketing, customer service, retention and billing. "We are trying to break down divisional walls and focus on the consumer, " she says. As the newspaper begins such tactics as tailored, direct-mail promotions to single-copy readers, she will know what works: Sun-Sentinel can track sales through a circulation-technology project led by Effinger that equipped distributors with hand-held computers to enter sales data by location every day.

A fifth-generation newspaper person (her great-great-grandfather cofounded the Goss printing-press company), Effinger spent five years in marketing and public relations before moving into newspaper management. Today, when she visits the Sun-Sentinel's press room as its Goss presses rumble into action, she knows, "It's the right place to be."