NAA Reorganizes Marketing Dept.

By: Joe Strupp The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) hopes to better organize its programs and sponsorships, as well as increase focus on readership initiatives, under a staff realignment of its marketing department. NAA is also merging its Co-operative Sales and Marketing Federation into its Display Federation on Aug. 1.

"We will have an added emphasis on readership and some better defining of the programs that we do," said John Kimball, senior vice president and chief marketing officer. "There are some things we do just because we have always done them and we need better coordination of that."

The realignment will reduce the marketing department's seven vice presidents to six and create several new divisions, Kimball said. The shake-up will combine the posts of vice president of display advertising and vice president of classified advertising into a new vice president of advertising, while also combining the vice president of business analysis and vice president of research into a new joint position.

Two new posts, vice president of marketing outreach and vice president of readership integration, will be created, Kimball said. The current vice presidents of circulation and small market newspapers remain unchanged.

"The bottom line is that this is a changing industry and NAA will change with it," said John Sturm, NAA president and CEO.

Kimball said the NAA wants to focus more attention on getting programs in place to improve readership at newspapers and working more with other newspaper organizations to share successful readership ideas. "We need to get our arms around all of the other work [on readership] being done in the industry," he said.

The marketing-outreach vice president, meanwhile, will review NAA's many programs that provide assistance, awards, and sponsorships to newspapers and see which need improvement and which may be no longer be useful. "Our members will see a more coordinated approach and be better able to take advantage of the services and products we have," Kimball added.

The realignment comes just weeks after a buyout offer to employees with at least 10 years of service resulted in 20 departures. A hiring freeze in place for the past 12 months, meanwhile, has resulted in another 10 employees leaving through attrition.

"We've gone through a fair amount of downsizing," said Kimball. "I felt like this was the time for some combining of functions and some new definition."

The 224 members of the Co-op Federation will automatically become members of the Display Federation; if they are already members of the display group, they'll be offered membership in any other NAA federation. NAA said a co-op committee will be established with two members serving on the Display Federation board and two on the Classified Federation board.

"This change will give us the opportunity to interact more directly with advertising and classified managers throughout the industry," said Charlie Kane, Co-Op Federation president and the co-op advertising coordinator for The Northwest Herald, Crystal Lake, Ill., in a statement.

The NAA now has eight federations.