The study’s purpose was to measure the impact of an individually designed lifestyle intervention programon the readers of a regionalnewspaper. A newspaper with 180,000 daily readers covered a story about three untrained and overweight adults who participated inan individually designed lifestyle intervention program.Their goals were to become physically fit and run a halfmarathon (21.1 km)after 14 weeks of training. The newspaper published on average three weekly articles throughout the project period, including theweekly training program and a record of the physical improvements made by the participants.The number of hits on the project’sweb site was recorded. Spin-off effects on the responses of readers were mapped. The project’s web site had 25,000 unique weeklyhits. Significant spin-off effects included the establishment of training groups which were still active after two years and the launchof a similar project by another regional newspaper.This individually designed lifestyle intervention programwas successfully scaledup and reached a large number of the newspaper’s readers. The collaboration between a newspaper and exercise researchers couldalso be adapted to other press media and represents a novel approach to improve participation in physical activities.
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