San Diego — The San Diego Union-Tribune has launched what its top brass is calling a "major initiative" to boost circulation at the paper, which serves America's sixth-largest city but barely makes the top-20 list nationally in terms of readership.

The drive, one of four separate efforts now underway in the U-T's Mission Valley offices to rethink the way the paper does business, doesn't sound terribly audacious. Gene Bell, the newspaper's president and CEO, says that over the next three years he hopes to boost daily sales of the paper to 400,000 from 380,000 and Sunday sales to 500,000 from 455,000.

But in an industry where readership has fallen steadily over the past 30 years, the initiative is quite ambitious -- especially since key details of the program, including precisely how the paper plans to win new readers, haven't been worked out yet.

Sources say that hasn't stopped Bell and his management team from turning the drive into the paper's new organizing principle, circulating a six-page mission statement to employees, building special suggestion boxes around the office, handing out coffee mugs emblazoned with the campaign slogans, and appointing steering committees to get the ball rolling.

The materials, however, paint a somewhat troubling picture of one of San Diego's oldest and most influential institutions, one where top managers -- the county's key opinion-shapers -- seem to be groping to answer one simple question.

Does anyone know what we're doing?

"Why 400,000/500,000?" the company says in a handout distributed to employees to kick off the campaign. "We want to thrive, not just survive." It continues:

We want to become a growth organization rather than a business in decline. We want to get ahead of threats to our industry, to protect our franchise and our role as a news and information source.

The percentage of San Diegans who read our paper has declined over the past couple of decades -- from over 60% in 1974 to under 40% in 1999. While some in the industry accept readership decline as inevitable, we're not ready to wave that white flag.

We're proud of what newspapers have meant to culture, countries and communities. We want to be essential to our community. We want to provide a better market for advertisers. We want to be a model for the industry.

400/500 is more than just a nice round number. It represents us regaining penetration and readers. It represents all of us creatively striving to reach an ambitious but attainable goal. As a newspaper or industry, we cannot shrink our way to greatness. We need to build on our current successes while we are financially healthy. Now is the time.

That's the good news. The rest of the six-page overview raises more questions than it answers. About the newspaper's content, for instance, it asks, "How do we get our newspaper talked about by everyone, everyday [sic]?" "What is it that we deliver to the reader?... How can we grow readership among and better connect with [minorities]?... Should we have a regular Sunday 'trademark' such as an investigative piece? Should our Sunday paper have a distinct personality from the daily?"

But the question many staffers want answered first is more fundamental. Whose bright idea, they ask, was it to launch a huge marketing campaign when the paper doesn't even have a marketing director? Rick Ott, the last man to hold the job, left the U-T last year, and his replacement still has not been named.

"It looks like they're going into battle without a key general," says one perplexed staffer who, like everyone interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified.

How serious, others wonder, is the U-T about seeing the 400/500 program through? A few years ago, they say, Bell and his top lieutenants were touting the precepts of Stephen Covey (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) as the paper's new organizing principles. Today, says one editor who lived through the fad, "Covey's dead."

How vulnerable is Bell's circulation drive to volatile variables like a rise in newsprint prices (the paper's second biggest expense after payroll) or to a strike by the paper's press operators?

"If we have to raise the price of the newspaper to cover higher costs," one newsroom veteran says, "subscribers will cancel like crazy and you can kiss that circulation increase good-bye. We'll be losing readers, not gaining them."

Another question among bureau reporters is this: Will management use the campaign to refocus on East County and South Bay, regions that have been underserved by the paper as it concentrated on wooing affluent suburbanites in North County?

"They've written them off for a long time," one staffer says, "and readers are realizing that. All the resources are going north. For a long time now, they have had only one assistant metro editor running both the east and south bureaus. Can you imagine that?"

Reporters and editors say they're also confused about how the 400/500 drive fits in with other existing company-wide corporate-improvement campaigns, including the GE Work-Out program, a Quality Circle campaign, and the Partners 2000 program, which was profiled in last week's Editor & Publisher.

"These things overlap a lot," says another reporter, "and the problem is you don't know which one is for real and which one is the flavor of the week."

The sheer number of new titles being handed out leaves little doubt: 400/500 is definitely for real, for now. As part of the effort, Bill Gaspard, the senior editor who helped turn the U-T's graphics, design, and photo staff into an award-winning team, has been press-ganged out of visuals and recommissioned "Senior Editor/Readership." Coffee mugs bearing a logo that reads "400/500: People, Passion, Principles" have been issued to employees. The back of the mug reads:

400/500 B.H.A.G.S.

(Big Hairy Audacious Goals)

To thrive, not just survive

To better reflect our community

To be a model to our industry To take charge of our future

The U-T's management is so excited about the program that it issued a press release -- an unusual move from the taciturn flagship of the Copley Press.

As a catalyst to developing the initiative, a number of Union-Tribune employees gathered at a recent Readership Conference to listen to innovative, challenging ideas from industry thinkers both outside and within the Union-Tribune family.

Concepts from that conference have been gathered under a few umbrella topics that will get considerable discussion and action at all levels of the organization in the next few months.

Who? What? When? Where? Why? The release never says. This continues with a quote from editor Karin Winner.

"The coming months will be full of change, rapid and exciting, as we head into the next year," Winner is quoted as saying. "For our newspaper to grow and become indispensible [sic] to the region, we have to elevate the quality, earn the trust of our readers and be more responsive to their needs. The better we are, the more our constituents will want to read us. It's a win-win for everybody, but especially for the community."

Problems of credibility and distrust are hardly unique to the U-T. The American Society of Newspaper Editors is conducting a three-year study looking into the problem of public distrust, which affects papers nationwide. An ASNE-sponsored study last year, for instance, found that, nationwide, readers think papers are filled with errors, condescending, biased, and divorced from the communities they purport to serve.

The U-T, of course, has all those problems and more, including some that could have a real impact on circulation and imperil the 400/500 campaign, sources say.

There's the paper's still-unresolved labor dispute with its pressroom workers, who are said to be in the process of asking their union for permission to begin strike preparations. A full-blown strike in that department could not only prompt a boycott of the paper but disrupt the smooth flow of papers and complicate customer retention.

There's some evidence -- including a recent front-page note from Winner to readers, apologizing for late papers -- that some of the pressroom employees are getting cute and engaging in unsanctioned slowdowns to protest management's recent treatment of the union.

Back in the third-floor newsroom, meanwhile, the effort to get reporters and editors to pull together may run into some trouble. In less than 45 days, the Newspaper Guild, which was thrown out last June by a narrow margin, will be allowed for the first time in 12 months to try to reorganize the newsroom. Though sources say the effort is unlikely to bring the Guild back anytime soon, it could be polarizing, reopening old wounds and undermining the spirit of cooperation the 400/500 plan needs.

Sources question the timing of management's campaign for another reason: Within the past few weeks, three veteran reporters -- Uri Berliner, Rex Dalton, and David Harpster -- have left the paper, compounding the disruption caused by the reassignment of more than half a dozen key editors, including Bill Gaspard, Rick Levinson, R.B. Brenner, Lori Hearn, Aida Bustos-Garcia, and Suzanne Choney.

"I don't think we've had this many bodies in motion since the [1991] merger [of the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune]," says one old hand. "Does anybody know where the paper's headed? The staff doesn't know."

Of course, if the 400/500 campaign were to fall short of its goals for any reason, Bell could always just goose the numbers and declare victory. One way to do that would be to include "total circulation," which includes heavily discounted and complimentary copies not normally counted in the current paid circulation figures, in the U-T's readership calculations. Usually the Audit Bureau of Circulations only counts copies sold at a discount of 50 percent or less off the newsstand price. But nowhere in the materials does Bell mention ABC-audited readership.

James B. Kelleher is a former assistant business editor at the Union-Tribune.