Some of you may have looked at the headline on this story and shrugged.

Why is Ecker writing a column about the Metro Sports Report having a modest gain of 1.3% in readership for the past year?

True, it's not a great surge in readers. But in today's market of fractured audiences and declining newspaper circulation, any gain for a media outlet should be heralded with great acclaim.

The Metro Sports Report had 1,039,220 pageviews in 2015. That's a gain of 13,626 pageviews from 2014, which represents an increase of 1.33 percent. I would have welcomed a bigger jump, of course, but it's still a move in the right direction.

Keep in mind that many of our readers are parents of high school students. When their son or daughter graduates from high school, the family might lose interest in its favorite school or team.

Their kid is in college now or employed somewhere, and while the family will probably maintain a general interest in the school or team, they might not click on the MSR as often as before.

Taking their place, hopefully, are families of new freshmen or sophomores whose children are competing for a varsity team for the first time in their high school careers. And unlike newspapers that have been around forever, not every family in the Metro area is aware of the Metro Sports Report and the service we provide.

We constantly have to find and cultivate new readers. The high schools and teams are a great help as they educate new families about the MSR, and we also try to spread the word through our daily radio spot on KGYM-AM 1600 at 4 p.m.

There are approximately 10,000 students at the eight high schools in Cedar Rapids and Marion. That means that approximately 2,500 of them graduate every year and are replaced by a new batch of kids.

The Metro Sports Report covers other teams than just the high schools - Kirkwood, Coe, Mount Mercy, the Kernels and RoughRiders - but the bulk of our readers are coming to the website for news about their favorite high schools. If we lost 25 percent of those readers every year when their kids graduated, we'd be in serious trouble if we didn't augment them with new readers.

That's why I'm proud, as president of the MSR, to report a 1.3 percent gain in readers for 2015. It means we held our core audience and added new readers along the way.

Newspapers are not fond of reporting their circulation figures, but some papers in the United States have seen their circulation drop by more than 33 percent in the past 10 years. That's according to the Alliance for Audited Media, which provides audited reports for all the papers. You can click on www.auditedmedia.com for more information about those circulation figures.

Newspaper owners and circulation managers don't like to talk about those numbers in public, because the alarming news only makes it worse in terms of trying to keep readers and advertisers.

Newspapers can be their own worst enemy, of course. As their circulation numbers and revenues decline, they reduce their workforce and shrink their news hole in an effort to save money, which only weakens their product and leads to more readers bailing out.

It's also true that more and more people are getting their news from online media companies, many of them owned and operated by the newspapers themselves, so the papers gain in digital readers at the same time they lose readers for their print products.

It's a tough business. And this column is not meant to pick on newspapers. I worked for newspapers for 35 years and we subscribe to both The Gazette and the Des Moines Register in our household.

Like many people of my generation, I like to pick up a newspaper and hold it in my hands. Younger people, however, are more prone to get their news from a variety of websites, including the Metro Sports Report.

We'll continue to keep plugging away. I'd naturally love to see a big gain in readers in 2016, but I'll be happy if we add another 1.3 percent to our list again this year. Growth is good, even when it's modest growth.

We've had 5,144,538 pageviews since we launched the Metro Sports Report five years ago. That includes 2,024,711 sessions and 594,197 users.

So if you looked at the headline on this story and shrugged, that's OK. But perhaps now you know the rest of the story.