The Midland News Association Ltd. is still heavily influenced by its founders, the Graham family, and is the UK’s largest independent newspaper publisher.
Express & Star was founded in 1874 and currently boasts the largest regional evening sale in the UK. Shropshire Star was launched in 1964 and has become one of the country’s most successful newspapers; it now sells over 55,000 copies per night from a beginning of only 21,000 copies.
Continual investment enabling editorial excellence, marketing innovation and production second to none has kept the group at the forefront of the publishing industry.
The MNA is evolving into a total media provider, with numerous channels to market, and a major focus is the ability to highlight to advertisers the entire MNA portfolio and how the audience interacts with and between these different media channels.
MNA Research
TNSMedia were commissioned to carry out the research programme on behalf of the Midland News Association. The objectives were to provide readership data for the full range of titles and to collect consumer behaviour and purchasing data covering a wide range of products and services.
The survey was administered in two parts - firstly, a face-to-face survey to collect core readership data in accordance with Jicreg guidelines, and secondly, a self completion booklet to capture the remaining consumer data. This dual approach allowed far more detailed questioning than an extended personal interview alone could have achieved whilst minimising respondent fatigue.
The face-to-face fieldwork was carried out between 29th January and 16th June 2008, excluding Easter. The survey took place within the marketing area where the household penetration was greater than 10% achieving an overall sample size of 4,119. All interviews were conducted in-home with adults aged 15+ and with at least half the interviews taking place either in the evenings or at weekends in order to accurately represent the working population.
Self completion booklets were then left with the respondents to achieve, in effect a mini TGI-type survey. To accommodate those who failed to return the self completion booklet a state of the art statistical technique, known as data ascription was then used to complete the data set. Data ascription, in effect models how the non respondents would have answered the questions in the self completion booklet, by looking at their demographic characteristics and answers to the face-to-face questionnaire and comparing these to respondents who did complete both questionnaires.
Research results are held at the MNA as part of a PC analysis system - Desktop Reporter. This allows detailed, non-standard investigation of the data to provide specific information for individual markets, products and clients.