A Quick Read   

Hackensack, New Jersey's Record, like hundreds of newspapers across the country, is seeking to boost stagnating circulation and win back readers who have begun to seek their daily news intake from other sources. And one of its tactics is based on the notion that less can be more.

In April the Record launched "Record on the Run," a news summary section that appears Monday through Friday. The section, perhaps the only one of its kind in a daily newspaper, separates from the rest of the paper and can be folded into quarters for easy reading on a bus or commuter train.

Aimed at suburbanites struggling to cope with harried lifestyles and long commutes, Record on the Run gives readers a quick look at the day's top stories in more than eight news categories, such as business, health, sports and entertainment. For readers who want more, the "newspaper within a newspaper" includes references to the page numbers in the Record where the entire story can be found.

Record on the Run is part of a marketing strategy at the Hackensack paper, called "Choices," that is designed to give readers a variety of options in how they receive their news. In addition to the pullout section, readers can choose to read Record on the Run via a Web site or subscribe to a fee-based fax news service called "Off the Record."

Record Editor Glenn Ritt says the pullout section and the Choices campaign in general grew out of marketing surveys that painted a picture of newspaper readers pressed for time and frustrated with their inability to squeeze reading the entire paper into a frazzled work day. The paper concluded it had to develop a new way to deliver news or it would no longer be useful to readers.

Not that the paper is abandoning its traditional format. The Record hopes that the pullout, which breaks the day's news down into easily digestible briefs, will eventually nudge readers back to reading the entire newspaper.

"Everything that we do has to leverage back to the core newspaper; that's our heart and soul, that's the sun and the solar system," says Ritt. "What we constantly have to tell our core market is that we are there to serve them."

Bob McGruder, executive editor of the Detroit Free Press and former president of the Associated Press Managing Editors, agrees, and says it is inevitable that other papers will follow the Record's lead. "The key is to be flexible enough to give readers information at their demand," he says, "not at our demand."