What does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel know that your newsroom doesn’t?

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
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But something’s different in Milwaukee. The daily newspaper is actually…kind of…almost…thriving.
There’s been plenty of pain along the way: layoffs, buyouts, wage freezes, and advertising declines. The staff is smaller, as it is almost everywhere.
But spend time talking to people in the newsroom and you’ll find morale is unusually high. Out in the community, the newspaper has maintained one of the nation’s highest rates of market penetration. And there’s a common thread between those two facts: Through all the financial stress, the paper has maintained — even extended — its commitment to watchdog, investigative reporting. Journalistically, the Journal Sentinel is in a period of real strength.
Since 2008 — over what has been the most crushing stretch in American newspaper history — the paper has won three Pulitzers and been finalists three other times. That’s a tally newspapers a lot larger than the Journal Sentinel can only envy....
The Journal Sentinel’s story begins with its location. Milwaukee is not an average newspaper town. It’s easy to fall back on Midwestern stereotypes — nice, earnest, civic-minded — but there’s some truth in them.
Managing editor George Stanley said that reader surveys have shown that people read the paper because they have “a desire to be good citizens.” The newspaper’s pollster told Stanley that civic engagement isn’t always a priority for newspaper readers. “In some of the places they had been, that reason was not even on the list,” Stanley said. “Not only was it not the top reason for reading the paper, but it didn’t even come up!”
The Journal Sentinel also found that the No. 1 reason women in its market read the paper is for investigative journalism, according to a survey Stanley says the paper conducted last year. “For men, investigative journalism was the No. 3 thing,” Stanley said. “No. 1 was the Packers. I forget what No. 2 was.”...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/09/what-does-the-milwaukee-journal-sentinel-know-that-your-newsroom-doesnt/