In early 1993 I asked the Arizona Republic’s library to pull together numbers on how many readers were actually responding to the paper’s various ways of inviting them in — contests, call-ins, the PressLine audiotext service. Joanne Dawson, the librarian, came back with this tally, along with a sensible caveat about the state of the data.
As you requested, here are some figures for how many people responded to the Republic’s “reaching out” through contests, call-ins, PressLine, etc. Many of the figures are estimates or averages as most areas do not keep statistics.
PressLine was the biggest piece, with 258,052 calls between December 29, 1991 and January 2, 1993. Sports scores dominated at 126,173, followed by movie reviews, sidebars, restaurant reviews and the recipe hotline. Short Takes, the Kids Page, sports phone-ins and a handful of contests filled out the rest.
GRAND TOTAL (est.) 334,790
What strikes me looking at this in 2026 is that almost nobody was keeping statistics. A third of a million reader interactions in a year, and most of it had to be reconstructed from old articles and someone’s best estimate of “40 calls/wk.” The audience was there and talking back — the newspaper just had no habit of measuring it. Web analytics would arrive soon enough and change that permanently.