This week's edition of GIS Weekly  tells the tale of how another newspaper figured out that GIS could be a vital tool for circulation.  Of course, many folks in the newspaper industry knew that long before word reached the editorial department, but no matter: more and more publishers and even some editors are "getting it."  See "The Cultivation of Newspaper Readership Using Segmentation Software" by Susan Smith. 

Here are some quotes:

"We mapped the single copy purchase points to determine where they are and how likely prospective newspaper readers were to be near them or see them and we found that we could a) increase the density of our single copy purchase points and b) relocate them to be more in field of travel of likely newspaper readers. When we did that, we saw in the Essex County Capital newspapers, basically the North Shore of Boston, for example, a 25% increase in single copy sales, during the course of less than a year.”

" What was the company's initial investment in the software?
“On an annual basis it's about $20,000-$30,000,” commented [research director Forbes] Durey. “The MapInfo software is priced in various stages. MapInfo's sales team was very flexible in designing a pricing strategy to meet our current needs. Our initial investment was $800-$900. We tested that for about a year, and then we decided to dive in and use all the data and capabilities that MapInfo offers. At this point, we purchased the full set of capabilities from MapInfo's TargetPro software. Newspapers can expect a varying degree of investment from $1,000 up to $30,000 or more.”

"If you look at the MapInfo investment we made, it equates to roughly 20 cents per subscriber per year. What fraction of the value of the subscriber is 20 cents? In the newspaper business today it's a very small fraction.”