Our questionnaire, your responses
It's high time we reported on the results of our 65th anniversary questionnaire. (After all, our 66th anniversary will be here in three days.) As you, Dear Readers, may recall, we published The Weekly Questionnaire late last year with a request that you respond in order that we may better serve you.
We must ask your indulgence for taking so long to tally the responses, but our understaffed staff had, shall we say, manpower problems. In addition, we wanted to carefully review each and every response, to check and double-check, and to take note of your suggestions and comments.
Some of your suggestions, we are proud to say, have already been implemented: for example, we now have a monthly children's page called "Ukelodeon" and a new column called "Focus on Philately." Some other suggestions will be implemented in the near future as we continue to strive to be responsive to our readers.
In the chart on the next page we report the results of our third poll of readers. (Our first was in 1981, our second in 1993.)
First, however, a few words about our respondents. A total of 171 persons sent in completed questionnaires. Special thanks go to Ukrainian National Association district committees in New England (which sent in 16 completed forms), Detroit (12 forms) and Pittsburgh (four forms), which took time out of their fall meeting agendas to fill out our questionnaire. One respondent sent in a donation to The Ukrainian Weekly Press Fund along with his response - for which we are doubly thankful. [The Ukrainian Weekly Press fund is the sole fund dedicated exclusively to supporting the work of this publication.]
We asked respondents to provide some personal information. Of those who did 145 were subscribers, 13 were not subscribers, but regular readers, four occasional readers and one person who responded "not applicable"; among them were 115 who are members of the Ukrainian National Association and 46 non-members; 119 are males, 40 are females, and one did not specify.
As for their ages: the numbers came in as follows: six are between the ages of 20 and 29; 15 are age 30-39; 33 are age 40-49; 33 are age 50-59; 30 are age 60-69; 33 are age 70 and over; three listed themselves merely as "retired"; and some did not reply at all.
Our respondents hail from a variety of states in the United States, at least four provinces in Canada and three other countries. The breakdown by states/provinces included these at the top: New York, 37; New Jersey, 19; Pennsylvania, and Illinois, 15 each; Michigan, 14; Connecticut, 10; Florida and Maryland, seven each; Ontario, five.
Next in line were: Ohio and Texas, four each; Massachusetts, North Carolina and Washington, three each; California, District of Columbia and Virginia, two each; Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Canada (province not given), France, Italy and Uzbekistan, one each.
A large majority - 119 - of our respondents have not visited The Ukrainian Weekly's official website, while 33 have.
Our questionnaire also posed several questions regarding the content of The Ukrainian Weekly.
The first question asked readers to tell us what types of news or regular features they usually read in The Ukrainian Weekly. In the interest of space, below we list only those categories that were cited by five or more readers.
| All (front to back) | 41 |
| Newsbriefs | 36 |
| Letters to the editor | 35 |
| News from Ukraine | 33 |
| Faces and Places (Kuropas) | 32 |
| Preview of Events | 25 |
| Editorials | 20 |
| Commentary (News & Views) | 15 |
| Arts/Culture | 15 |
| Columnists (unspecified) | 14 |
| Interviews | 13 |
| Notes on People | 11 |
| Front page | 10 |
| Local community news | 10 |
| Church affairs | 9 |
| Books/new releases | 9 |
| Canadian news | 7 |
| Most of the paper | 7 |
| Business news | 6 |
| Dateline | 6 |
| Analysis | 6 |
| Turning the Pages | 6 |
| Sports | 6 |
| Advertisements | 5 |
| U.S. news | 5 |
| For the Record | 5 |
We then asked readers to be specific in responding to the next two questions about what they enjoyed most and least in our newspaper. Though they weren't as specific as we would have liked, the responses came in as follows. (Again, we list only those items cited by five or more respondents.)
| Kuropas columns | 31 |
| News from Ukraine | 26 |
| Letters | 15 |
| Church affairs | 14 |
| Newsbriefs | 9 |
| Arts | 8 |
| 2020 Conference | 8 |
| Articles about people | 7 |
| Sports | 7 |
| Orthodox debate | 6 |
| Editorials | 6 |
| Books | 6 |
| Interviews | 5 |
| Historical | 5 |
| Preview | 5 |
| UNA news | 17 |
| Sports | 12 |
| Community news | 9 |
| Church affairs | 9 |
| Soyuzivka | 6 |
| Hockey | 5 |
| Turning | 5 |
Finally, Dear Readers, we wish to express our sincere appreciation to those of you who helped us evaluate our performance by filling out The Weekly Questionnaire. Specials thanks to those who provided additional comments and even letters, sharing their ideas with our community newspaper. Please keep on reading and keep in touch.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, October 3, 1999, No. 40, Vol. LXVII
| Home Page |