How the Dunn Daily Record earned 112 percent penetration in their community

I’m currently reading Made to Stick, which aims to teach people how to make their ideas have more cultural staying power. In other words, what you can do to make an inherently boring but important concept more interesting, so that people will remember it.

I just finished reading a segment about the Dunn Daily Record, a paper in North Carolina that has more than 100 percent market penetration in the Dunn community.

That means that either people outside of Dunn are reading the paper, or Dunn residents are buying more than one copy.

The book was written in 2007. As far as I can tell, the Daily Record still has amazingly high market penetration.

What, according to the founder of the paper, is the reason for their success?

In his words (taken from the book):

All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else. Always remember, the mayor of Angier and the mayor of Lillington are just as important to those towns as the mayor of New York is to his people.

That sounds strikingly similar to something I wrote several months ago. It’s always good to find evidence to back up my unsubstantiated claims

The lesson is simple: people care about seeing themselves in local news. Coverage that focuses on the people of the community will outperform generic wire coverage every day of the week.

In my mind, this doesn’t address the larger issue of where print as a medium is going, and whether hyper-local coverage is a solution or a stop-gap. But either way it’s clearly working for Dunn.

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