Charlotte Harbor: Small Market Paper Produces Big Time Results
by Bob Sims
Quality is the watchword of the Sun Coast Media Group in Charlotte Harbor, Fla. Led by the Sun Herald, its 29,000-plus circulation daily, the company has earned itself a reputation in print and online for the way it does business:
- Its dramatic reduction in newsprint waste earned pressroom staff the 1998 TechNews Best Practices Award for Materials (see "A Will to Cut Waste," January/February 1998, p. 9).
- Sunline, the company's innovative World Wide Web site and Internet service provider, has won numerous NAA and Editor & Publisher online awards. A site operated for local Realtors won best online special-section honors in the just-awarded 1999 Eppys. In fact, Sunline has been called the best online-newspaper presence in the world.
But Sun Coast isn't resting on its laurels. Faced with 70 press runs weekly, the company plans to spend as much as $2 million to upgrade its Goss Urbanite Series 5000 presses and shed problematic flying pasters bought as prototypes. The company also is examining computer-to-plate technology after purchasing two ECRM 4450 imagesetters about two years ago.
To maintain and expand its Internet customer base, Sun Coast will continue what has spelled success in its e-business—buying the best technology and relying on Sunline workers to provide top-notch customer service.
What Are They Thinking?
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| Meetings like this one, are repeated twice daily in each Sun Herald department. |
Sun Coast is as likely to have high-technology gear for its Internet operations in one corner as ancient Macintosh computers in another. Equipment isn't necessarily what comes first. For nearly a decade, the company has embraced an intensive philosophy of continuous quality improvement powered by its people, managers say.
"I like to think of us as a big small paper," says Jim Gouvellis, the executive editor and an 18-year employee of various incarnations of the paper. "If we're about anything right now, we're about getting better. We have a will to win."
That's what prompts Gouvellis to publish "Today's Paper," a daily compilation of observations, praise and criticism of each product. Every editorial employee has a copy on his or her desk by mid-morning. It's part of a paperwide process, he says.
"We said we're going to change the way we run our business," he says. "We count things. We track things."
And they do nutty things like involve every employee in decisions. In the newsroom, that means a vote is taken on stories to include and where to play them. It means empowering and rewarding press operators who come up with ways to print faster with less waste. It means letting operations and newsroom people dummy the daily newspaper. (After all, they're the ones left late at night solving layout problems that could break a 5:30 a.m. on-lawn delivery promise.) And it means twice-daily gatherings of workers from each department. They're required to address problems and identify solutions not just in their shops, but also throughout the paper. And each must bring to the table suggestions from Sun Coast customers.
Vice President of Operations Richard A. Hackney says a typical business has as much as 30 percent waste in its processes. Management is to blame, he contends.
"We're focusing on quality," he says.
An Information Service Company
Sunline is the brand of Sun Coast's whopping Internet business. It includes online versions of the daily zoned newspaper and other print products, but made headlines and won hearts by bringing Internet access to this hamlet on Florida's Gulf Coast. Then, it gave local folks server space and training so they could post e-versions of newsletters and other community information, including personal home pages for residents and their pets alike."As we grow and expand, we buy the latest and greatest technology out there," says Debbie Dunn-Rankin, Sunline's general manager.
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| Debbie Dunn-Rankin confers with Paul Long. Sunline's Internet site has been called one of the world's best. |
As many newspapers edge out of the Internet-access business, Sun Coast continues expanding capacity. Its ISP can handle as many as 6,000 simultaneous connections at 56 kilobits per second. That's a far cry from March 1996, when, after noticing that America Online and other national providers didn't offer local-access numbers, Sunline made its debut with gear allowing as many as 48 customers to connect at a then-blazing 28.8 kbps.
The area's graying population, which expands by thousands during the winter months as "snowbirds" flock to warmer climes, posed a unique challenge: Would seniors use computers?
The myth was partly shattered when seniors-turned-customers came to Sunline in droves, Dunn-Rankin says. That's because seniors are more computer-savvy than generally thought and because the company's "customer support is really, really good," she adds. When Sunline was launched, so many interested people showed up at an informational meeting that dozens were turned away and another session was scheduled.
Sunline has two customer-support workers who ensure no advertiser or reader goes unhelped; staffers recall how the former general manager once made a house call to show a customer how to reset her frozen computer, only to be found working under the customer's desk by a suspicious husband.
All employees are trained to ensure every call is answered satisfactorily, managers say.
But e-business customer service goes beyond Sunline. It's also part of the job in the paper's small but efficient "phone room," which handles everything from inside sales and classifieds to in-house surveys, all coordinated using a comprehensive database. Phone-room staffers also take a bevy of calls from Internet customers who want help in using the Web site or selling online.
Ron P. Smith, the paper's classified, circulation and telemarketing manager, says Sun Coast was one of the first dailies to put all of its classified content online, an effort begun three years ago. Sun Coast also couples print editions with unique e-offerings. Boater's Bargains, for instance, includes a user-friendly electronic edition allowing searches to be shaped by everything from price to hull shape. Photos help boost the product's readership and revenue both in print and online, Smith adds.
Powered by Print
Print continues driving Sun Coast's business, however, and the paper continues improvements at its own deliberate pace—all capital expenditures are paid in cash. That's why it may take up to five years to buy equipment as part of the solution for press-capacity problems, managers say.
"We run out of press every night," says press-center manager Steve McManus, showing off a building expanded some two years ago to house its marketing and circulation areas on one end and operations at the other.
A 12-unit Goss Metro Urbanite Series 5000 press, five troublesome pasters and five reelstands make up the current press line.
McManus now envisions a dream setup of 20 units, including six three-high Goss or Goss-like presses, nine pasters, a second folder and three-high formers.
Sun Coast press teams made headlines in 1997 when they attacked waste and quality issues. They worked in teams and used cash rewards to cut average newsprint waste from 6 percent to 2.7 percent that year. Waste was even lower, at 2.5 percent, in 1998.
Says McManus, "I still think we can go lower."
Part of the effort was establishing baselines to measure against, he says. The company now tracks press-operator performance, web breaks, paper sources and many other variables to spot quality issues before they grow into quality problems, McManus says. A move toward preventive and predictive maintenance practices is also under way, replacing the reactive or crisis-management styles used before, McManus adds.
Another recent effort was returning the paper's problematic pasters to the press line. Purchased as live-test prototypes from the now-defunct Web Quip of Chicago, the machines had been shut down because they were in disrepair. McManus laughs at the story of using a part from an auto store to restore a light on the equipment. Operational once more, the pasters have given the pressroom the gift of time, McManus says. But partly because of his experience with the gear, he doubts Sun Coast will go the prototype route again.
Vendors, Partners, Idea Factories
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| Head technician Randall Hixson troubleshoots Sunline's network. |
In fact, Sun Coast has decided to evaluate all of its vendor relationships, says Hackney. And that doesn't just mean trying to get the best price.
Vendors are becoming partners with Sun Coast, which emphasizes quality first, service and competent response second, and support third, according to Hackney. "They become, in fact, an extension of the company," he says.
Making informed choices by involving workers in equipment decisions and communicating continuously with vendors has led to a variety of purchasing methods. When it is time to replace aging editorial Macintosh equipment, the company buys off-the-shelf iMacs. But for current and long-term planning and Internet gear, it works with an outside consulting firm, Bay Resources of Tampa.
The insights needed to handle such forward-thinking decisions often comes from the twice-daily department meetings, which hold workers from each department "accountable to one another," says Hackney.
The two gatherings (one is at 4 p.m., the other around 9:30 p.m.) could be contentious affairs, "but they haven't been that way in years," Hackney says. Instead, the meetings are idea factories where solutions are born.
"If it makes sense, we'll do it as soon as possible. Very few things take more than 24 hours for us to do something about."
And the employee-to-employee meetings often turn on the same theme top managers constantly tout: continuous improvement and quality. "If you start with quality, you get quality," Hackney says. "We're trying to get a little bit better every day."
Bob Sims is a free-lance writer based in Kissimmee, Fla. E-mail, bkscoop@aol.com; phone, (407) 935-1567.