Community Newspapers Get Wrapped
Up in Reporting on Their Neighborhoods
Johnny’s team won in Little League. Susie is on the honor roll. The Kiwanis Club is having its annual spaghetti dinner next Friday.
Mayoral candidates offered their solutions to Ocean Beach’s water quality at a recent forum. They may not often be headlines in the major papers, but they are the stuff news is frequently made of , attracting readers at their front doors, newsstands or mailboxes , for the community papers across San Diego and the country.
The local community newspaper industry has followed nationwide trends, such as single owners operating several papers, and the organizations reacting to the Internet age.
Still, the papers continue to explore their smaller coverage territories, finding ways to stretch editorial and advertising resources and reach into their communities.
– Papers Reflect Neighborhoods
More than in any other publication, the future of community papers hinges on their readers finding themselves , often literally by name , and their close-to-home issues in the pages, said Dean Eckenroth, publisher and owner of the Coronado Eagle & Journal and the Eagle & Times in Imperial Beach. “Community newspapers do something that television can’t and large daily newspapers can’t,” Eckenroth said. “We cover the things that can’t be addressed by those mediums , church, what’s going on in the schools, what the Little League team is doing, what the Kiwanis Club has on their program for next week, what the hospitality auxiliary has planned, whether or not there’ll be a concert in the park,” he said. “These are important things to a community.”
Compared to the larger metropolitan publications, community papers do report in more depth on close-to-home topics such as school boards and water districts.
Coverage of high school sports is one example of the link the papers forge with readers, said Jay Harn, who owns and publishes the Alpine Sun, Santee Star, La Mesa Forum, Lakeside Leader, Lemon Grove Review, Spring Valley Bulletin and El Cajon Eagle. “That kind of stuff is vital to a small paper,” he said. “It builds readership and people love them.”
On the marketing side for the papers, an important element to many of them is that they are free. Many are distributed to every door in a community, and some are supplemented by bulk drops.
– Advertisers Drawn By Dense Distribution
The market saturation appeals to advertisers, said David Mannis, whose Mannis Communications, Inc. operates six papers under the name San Diego Community Newspaper Group.
Mannis’ papers had sales of $2.5 million in revenue last year, he said. With the addition of his new Downtown paper, he expects that figure to increase this year, he said.
Looking at research his company has done each year, Mannis thinks the distribution strategy helps penetrate the target market’s minds.
“We also feel like we’re developing readership at the same time, because whether you want the readership or not, you get it at your door,” he said. If the readers keep receiving the paper, they begin to pick it up and flip through it, and really start to read it, he said.
Mannis and his wife, Julie, first published Pacific Beach paper Beach & Bay Press in September of 1988. Since then, the couple have added to their weekly papers, starting La Jolla Village News, Golden Triangle News in University City and buying The Peninsula Beacon, which covers Point Loma, Ocean Beach and the Sports Arena area.
The other two papers, both of which they launched, are the Senior Lifestyles, which is published monthly, and the Downtown News, distributed every other Wednesday. The latter was launched in June.
– Staff Jigsaw Their Positions
The papers subsist on a joint editor-in-chief, then each has its own editor and senior reporter.
However, the papers share layout, graphics and sales staffs, which is how owning multiple papers becomes profitable, Mannis said.
Whether many papers under one ownership serve the readers well is another story, said Tim Wulfemeyer, coordinator of San Diego State University’s journalism program.
A lot of it depends on the philosophy, the training and the goals of the owners and staffers who work for these companies, Wulfemeyer said.
“I think the possibility is there for better community service and better service for consumers, but that has to come from the top,” he said.
“If it doesn’t, if the people are just in it for the money, to kind of maximize the money, and don’t really care too much about the quality of service they provide, whether it be accuracy, completeness, balance, whatever, then obviously it can be a disadvantage.”
Mannis, Eckenroth and Bob Page, owners of the Rancho Santa Fe Review, Carmel Valley News and Del Mar Village Voice, take the advantages of multiple papers a step further.
– Profiting From Reciprocal Sales
As businesses, the three have banded together in a sales relationship that allows each to sell ads into each others’ papers, which totals about 130,000 in door-to-door distribution and bulk drop to the papers’ coastal demographics, Mannis said.
The papers sell each other’s space at a slightly discounted rate, Eckenroth said.
It’s a way for the smaller circulation papers to attract the advertisers that target regions, such as realtors, institutions, banks, auto dealers and insurance companies, he said.
The newspapers have had the relationship for about five years, Eckenroth said. However, sales have increased more rapidly in the last few years, as word has spread, Eckenroth said.
Mannis added a similar agreement could be worked out for graphics, production, and even editorial departments.
He uses examples such as joint special reports on a major event in the county, or producing the separate papers using only one office’s computer equipment.
– A Tight Focus On Local News
The business opportunities may become more sophisticated, but publishers such as Eckenroth and Mannis vow to keep each paper’s community focus simple.
“You want people to pick up the paper and say, ‘That’s my community,'” Eckenroth said.
Even when covering a smaller area, staying on top of the news is tough, Eckenroth said.
With scaled-down budgets, the papers use free-lance writers, most of them from the community it covers, and other kinds of non-staff writing.
For instance, the Eagle & Journal often will cover a controversial topic by running opinion pieces from two outside writers, Eckenroth said. The two stories will represent both sides of an issue, he said.
– Area Residents Contribute Stories
Harn, who owns the East County papers, said most of his non-staff writers are community members writing free-lance stories, and the majority of them have some journalism experience.
From there, he depends on his full-time editorial staff, which consists of four editors and a staff writer, to make sure the coverage is complete, accurate and fair.
He doesn’t run into a lot of problems with fairness and accuracy, Harn said. Because the writers live in the community, they tend to approach the story from the citizens’ perspective, he said.
Another factor already in the faces of community publications is the Internet. Many of the community papers have yet to develop a strong, regularly updated Web presence, noting that it’s still an expensive item for their budgets.
Harn doesn’t see the Internet as a challenge to community newspapers, mainly because the content of community papers is so different from what the major organizations compete to offer and market on the Web.
Gregory Dennis, who edited and worked in community papers in North County for 14 years, isn’t optimistic about the industry’s future. Now a partner in his own public relations firm, Dennis sees advertisers finding other ways to get their message out.
– Cultural Change Affects Circulation
He also sees a cultural change among readers that causes community papers to lose their audience, Dennis said.
“People read less and less, and these days, they’re not only watching TV, they’re online,” he said.
“What I see here is a weaker sense of community,” Dennis said. “We’ve got one suburb running into the other. So, if you have less local identity, you have less reason to read the local paper. That makes it harder and harder to get readership.”
Another challenge to the advertising side of the business is that advertisers’ budgets, as a whole, are not growing, Wulfemeyer noted.
From there, he said, the key is to stay as locally focused as possible. The localized focus will serve the papers well, whether they eventually enter the Internet or not, he said.
“It’s like anybody else building a better mousetrap,” he said. “If you can come up with a way to localize information and make it meaningful to people, such that they’re willing to pay for it in some way, whether it’s just being a reader so you can sell that reader to advertisers or actually pay some sort of minor fee to get the latest results from the Grossmont/La Mesa Pop Warner league or whatever, those are going to be the organizations that are going to be able to succeed.”
– Serving Unique Consumer Demands
The papers need to tap into the public’s unique information needs, Wulfemeyer said.
“Like anything else, you have to differentiate yourself in the market,” he said. “And I think community newspapers are sort of uniquely set up to do that. It’s just a matter of if they have the resources, do they have the will and can they ride out the up-front costs with the idea of long term.”
The idea, Wulfemeyer said, is “If we get this right, then we will be able to reap some economic benefits.”
They have that franchise on the local connection, he noted. “By definition they’re more tied to the local communities than any of these other media organizations,” he said. They should take advantage of that unique quality and maximize it as much as they possibly can, whether it be in a printed publication, or make it easily accessible via the Internet.
“The key is continuing to get as local as you possibly can, and to cover the local community as completely and as fairly as you possibly can. I guess it’s the age-old marketing technique, let the people know what you’re doing and how well you’re doing it, and hopefully they’ll buy it.”