Sorry to be so long without a post. I was on vacation and I should have posted that before I left. By the way I had a great vacation. Our three grandchildren were with us from Texas and we spent most of the week camping at the coast and having a great time with our dog and some friends and other family members who joined us. There are teenagers involved now and boy what a trip that is.
I don't know how many of you read the piece in the SF Chronicle magazine about the newspaper battle being waged in Eureka between the Eureka-Times Standard - a sister paper of ours in the Media News Group, and the Eureka Reporter.
It was I thought a fair piece although I believe that Mr. Arkley's sole reason for launching the newspaper was the fact that the Times-Standard did not endorse his wife for mayor and she lost.
The only thing missing from the piece, I thought, was that Mr. Arkley is losing money every day on that newspaper. The money from his personal fortune he has spent on a first class press, expensive newsprint and highly paid graphic artists and reporters and other staffers while giving the paper away free every day (the issues I have seen have few ads in them) tells the story. We estimate that he is losing millions every year on his personal goal to put the Times-Standard out of business. And he has said that is the goal, not just having an alternative to the T-S in town.
Anyone in business who did not have a personal agenda would look at this model and say, it doesn't work.
I do believe competition in the market is good. But the reason there are so few small dailies that are entirely independent is that it's very expensive to put out a newspaper.
While circulation is important and you want lots of people reading your newspaper, the 50 cents they pay for it is not what pays the bills. What pays the bills is the advertising. And that's often a cyclical. When the economy is good, advertising is good, especially classifieds, which are a big part of a newspaper's income. Mr. Arkley doesn't worry about any of those things - he has a personal fortune which he is willing to spend regardless of the return. His return is the joy he gets tweaking the nose of the local daily that gave his wife a black eye.
We often hear ourselves labeled "corporate newspaper." People talk about the money the corporation drains from the local economy. I don't buy that. While thank goodness no one seems anymore to believe that the parent company is dictating our news and editorial coverage, or that advertisers do, what some still seem to believe is that having a national newspaper group as owner is somehow bad for the local economy. What they don't talk about is the medical, dental, and vision benefits our employees get; the 401k plans, the education grants for our children and the two weeks paid vacation after one year and three weeks paid vacation employees get after their second year here, plus paid sick leave and seven paid holidays. How many "local" businesses offer that to their employees?
Anyway, newspapers are in a betwixt and between time right now. We are printing paper editions every day while also having to host first rate Web sites that give our product away for free and to which more and more people are turning. We love that part, but having to do both expensive print and less expensive but still labor intensive on-line at the same time is a tricky balancing act. We have to make sure every dime is spent wisely in the meantime.