Sunday home delivery circulation is growing at the Tennessean.

Yep, that’s not a misprint, our Sunday home delivery circulation is growing in the 17 counties of our MSA. Allow me to provide some details.

Earlier this year, we made the decision at the Tennessean to pull back on home delivery in several outlying counties. It just didn’t make sense to continue to lose money on newspapers we delivered in those counties. However, we set up several agreements with wholesalers in those areas and we have been able to recover 68% of what we stopped delivering. And, due to how we arranged the wholesaler agreements, we did so profitably.

But our main focus is on 17 core counties in our MSA. These are the counties most important to our advertisers and, in July, we made the decision to invest a significant amount of money for sales and marketing efforts to grow circulation in these counties.

It’s working.

For the first week of October, Sunday home delivery circulation was up 129 copies versus last year. This last Sunday, we were up 1,649 copies.

And it’s not just the sales and marketing efforts that are making a difference. Good journalism, like the story Jaime Sarrio did on Sunday, October 4, about misuse of credit cards among Metro School officials is earning rave reviews from readers. The feedback from that story along with others tells us that people are hungry for good investigative journalism and will respond by buying the newspaper when they think we are doing a good job.

We will continue to update the circulation numbers in the weeks and months ahead.