Of all the modifications we’ve made to The Herald, the one I’m most excited about and the one that is going to offer the greatest benefit to our advertising customers is the increase of our single-family household circulation to 47,000 — more than triple our current distribution. That means we’re arriving at nearly 75 percent of the homes in Johnston County.

In addition, if a business owner wants to reach nearly 100 percent of the households in Johnston County, he could add our total-market-coverage product, MidWeek Values, and The News & Observer to his advertising plan.

Once the decision was made to convert from paid to free circulation, change our day of delivery to Wednesday and increase distribution, we began contacting advertisers. Our sales team talked with their customers to explain how the changes would affect them and to answer questions they had.

A frequently asked question focused on our decision to insert The Herald inside 8,000 copies of The News & Observer. We were asked if doing so would diminish The Herald’s autonomy. The answer is no. We’re delivering more than 39,000 copies outside The N&O. It just makes sense to us to use an established, quality delivery system to get to the homes. It doesn’t change the paper; it doesn’t change our operation.

We were also asked if going from paid to free decreased our legitimacy as a newspaper. The answer is no. We view this as an opportunity to educate, entertain and inform more readers with our award-winning publication. Frankly, in a world where so many free avenues of information exist, the expectation from readers is that they’ll receive our newspaper free.

And we look down the road at our sister newspaper, The Eastern Wake News, a free publication in Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon, and marvel at the loyalty of its readers.

From a business standpoint, it’s impossible to increase distribution at this level without increasing advertising rates. However, we chose not to increase our rates at the same level as we increased our distribution. In fact, it’s a better deal. The cost per thousand households reached is nearly one-third of that under the previous circulation and rate structure.

For more information, contact me at 934-2176 or at saltman@nando.com.