Take a pass on Wick Communications

A couple of blog posts ago, I asked, rhetorically, "How do you run a daily paper without an AP wire?"

As I interviewed at said paper, and as it hasn't hired me, I'm going to "decloak" that previous blog post and let you read in detail who I was talking about.

Obviously, the parent company is Wick Communications. Below, most the rest of that old post, paper locations revealed.

==

I'm not talking a five-day daily, where that wouldn't be that hard.

I'm talking six- and seven-day dailies, where it would be, unless you tighten page count, drop a day of the week or both.

I recently interviewed to be managing editor of the Montrose Press. Wick's stable includes one seven-day daily, one that ... sounds like was a seven-day and now it's now six-day and is being delivered by USPS, interestingly and five or six other six-day dailies, all 3,000 circ or above.

Demographic background? Montrose, Colorado is about 19K. County is 42K. Montrose was "discovered" and presumably "Californicated" in the 2000-2005 period. City pop jumped from 13K to 19K. Froze after the Great Recession, and interestingly, has stayed frozen since; the Californication was a one-off.

Note: I'm going to drop some new updates in here based on a close direct comp with the Gainesville (Texas) Daily (until COVID, in print) Register. Gainesville is 16K in a county of 40K.

Page run? 12-14 a day, I was told, on weekdays. Dunno about the weekender. Since, interestingly, it's a 6 day AM, not PM, there isn't a weekender, to be technical. It's Tuesday-Sunday.

Gainesville, pre-COVID, was a five-day daily in print. Usually 8 pages Tuesday and Wednesday; 12 on Thursday, IIRC, because it still (WHY?) ran weekly TV guide in print. Then 10 Friday and 12, IIRC, weekender.

So, Montrose, with no Colorado equivalent of something as wide as the Texas Tribune? Even though it was more of a regional center than Gainesville (which is only 30 miles from Denton)? Two pages a day too many, arguably, even WITH the wire. Definitely needed to cut two without it, and pre-COVID, cut a day of the week, probably.

Company policy is to can the AP wire. Not as in "someday," but "we're doing it." Related to that is the usual "digital first" etc. blather. Which is what it is.

First, they don't have a separate online-only subscription. I know a lot of smaller dailies do a forced combo buy of print plus digital but if you're really digital first, that itself is bullshit. (That said, assuming they use Blox as their website content platform, I don't know how easy it is to set Blox up to do that. On the other hand, given that Blox comes from Lee Enterprises, owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, surely it's doable.)

So, do you cut a day a week? Same sked but cut two pages a day? IMO, yes, that second option at a minimum. Filling 12-14 pages in a county of less than 50K without a wire and typical smaller six-day editorial staff? Uhhhhhh ...

See above. Tuesday-"weekend" five-day daily. Say, 10 pages on Tuesday, 12 on Wednesday with it being shopper flier day. Back to 10 on Thursday. Then 12 on Friday with weekend sports previews and 12 or 14 on weekend.

There are ways around this. One can either cut two pages a day, or one day a week. I speak from personal knowledge.

My current six-day baby is in a town 3/4 the size and a county 4/5 the size of the one at which I interviewed. At my previous semiweekly, the nearest daily was a small seven-day in a town and county both half again as big as Montrose.

My current six-day runs 10 pages on weekdays. On average, 1/2-3/4 a page a day of news, maybe a bit more, and 1/4-1/2 of sports is wire. That seven-day, to my best memory, usually ran 12 on Mondays, 14-16 the next four and Saturdays. It ran one full page or bit more a day of news wire and probably 1/2-3/4 day of sports wire.

So, yes, unless one wants to use cheapie brief sites like State Point, or canned product-placement copy from a place like NAPS, or third, hope your state extension office has plenty of non-ag consumer news, etc., cutting two pages a day is ... a no-brainer.

It's even more a no-brainer with the Trump paper tariffs, which also offer said company the perfect excuse to cut either two pages a day or one day a week, whichever is deemed better.

"Dear Readers: Due to the ongoing Trump tariffs, and their threat to the profitability of this newspaper, we have had to make some painful decisions.

"One of them is cutting two pages of the paper each day.

"In order to keep the same amount of local content as before, we are getting rid of our Associated Press service. Given that we are a community newspaper, and we only ran selected items from the Associated Press in the past, and will look for other sources for state of Colorado and Four Corners news outside the AP, we think this is the best way to provide the best community news content to you our readers."

Now, that said, if your state press association doesn't have at least a weekly roundup column, while national wire might not be a biggie, some state news, especially in-depth state lege coverage while it's in session, to me is de rigeur. That's even more the case if you're running a seven-day daily and there's a bigger seven-day daily next county over. That's true of Montrose and the Colorado press association, or Wick's core in Arizona. (more on that below.)

On the other hand, in a location like Montrose, dumping the wire might not be the smartest. Are the Californicators going to be as interested in a paper without state wire? Or regional Western news? If they can read a header and first 100 words of local news on your website, you may lose them. I don't know. (Remember, no wire means no wire on web as well as print.)

See note above about no Colorado equivalent to the Texas Tribune.

Anyway, with papers bigger than Montrose either narrowing their web on the pages, cutting pages or cutting staff because of the newsprint tariffs (which Congressional bills going nowhere won't stop if they're going nowhere), keeping the same page count without a wire is simply stupid.

That said, the parent company doesn't seem brilliant.

Wick's flagship is Sierra Vista, Arizona, home of Fort Huachuca. It has a six-day daily at Lake Havasu, but that's far away. Much closer, it has weeklies and a semiweekly in SE Arizona; it and a presumably LARGE weekly in a town of 15K are in what should be a hub relationship with Sierra Vista; specifically, Nogales is the semi-weekly in a town of over 20,000 and Douglas is a large weekly.

But, a much bigger seven-day daily, Tucson's Arizona Daily Star, is 75 miles away. If I were it, I might roll the dice and start trying to poach subscribers at the edge Sierra Vista radius. If I really wanted to roll the dice, I might figure that Cochise County is big enough for me to open a bureau (one-person) there. (Douglas is also there; Nogales is due south of Tucson in Santa Cruz County and actually as close to Tucson as to Sierra Vista in miles, and shorter in drive time.) I might add an ad person full-time in Sierra Vista, too. Maybe even a regional sectional 1x or 2x a week. Douglas should be a semiweekly, IMO, and old jokes aside, why Nogales isn't a triweekly, if not a five-day daily, no idea. Santa Cruz County is almost 50K. If the Arizona Daily Star pushed hard enough, it could probably blow up that whole house of cards.

With Sierra Vista a military town, cutting sports wire as well as news wire? My guess would be that's going to definitely hurt print circulation.

(I also saw nothing about Spanish-language papers in Wick's stable; that SHOULD be a no-brainer. Get one reporter who can write some Spanish and translate English and have them do a semi-weekly that combines material from all three of those papers. If Nogales and/or Douglas are deemed too heavily Hispanic and/or too poor to expand English-language papers, to me, that seems a no-brainer that probably should have been done long ago. If someone else has a Hispanic paper in either locale, or Sierra Vista, Wick should have bought it long ago.)

And, that gets to one way you can get rid of the wire more easily — clustering. Not necessarily immediately next door, but increased clustering within a state. That lets you do a state-level version of Gannett's state-by-state daily news roundup. Wick is actually in position to do this in Arizona. With one or two buys in either North or South Dakota, or both, it could do it in one or both of those states, especially since it has the South Dakota capital paper in Pierre.

But ... I doubt Wick is that forward thinking, even though it's in a position to do so in one place.

And, not to be too immodest, but ... I could be a great newspaper company consultant. Companies would just have to pay me to tell them at times that I think they've been stupid, then challenge them to tell me why I'm wrong.

Also, at least one paper in the chain doesn't include special sections for subscribers. No, really ...

All subscriptions may include up to six premium issues per year. For each premium issue, your account balance will be charged an additional fee of $2 in the billing period when the section publishes. This will result in shortening the length of your billing period. …  These (listed but deleted by me) months will have the effect of reducing the length of delivery service otherwise covered by your payment. Months are subject to change without notice. You may choose to opt-out of receiving premium issue content by calling xxxxxxxx

OK now. (I can't remember which paper that is; I think it's one of their North Dakota dailies.)

Nickel and dime time.

It's not unethical, in that it's printed up front. But 3,000 subscribers x $2 x four quarters a year? $25,000 or so out of what should be, oh, $1.25 million gross revenue easy? Three percent is not nothing, but it's not a lot.  Throw in the progress issue and the city/county guide issue free to subscribers and save your bookkeeper and circ staff some hassle if nothing else.

Otherwise, on the double no-brainer vs. reality? Let's just say I've visited Glassdoor as well. The answers I got, as mentioned in the italicized paragraph, didn't surprise me.

To go into detail? I am leery of a company that has less than, say a 3.3 rating out of 5 stars on Glassdoor. Knowing newspaper struggles, I would be OK taking that down to 3.0 for papers.

Wick as a corporation didn't even hit that.

This might be a good point to refer you back to my MSM bingo, community newspapers division, blog post.

==

Sidebar —

That said, I wouldn't write this much about the Montrose Press if I didn't know something about Montrose. I do; Montrose wouldn't be a bad place to live. I also know something about Mountain/Intermountain West towns being discovered, even being full-blown Californicated.

Taos is a good, or bad, example of that. On a small city scale, arguably Fanta Se is, too.

That said, in Nuevo Mexico, I also know the other end of the stick. A decade or so, Silver City had the first nibbles of being "discovered" but that's all that happened. It was more rumors than reality and it continues to lose population. Maybe Californicators thought it was too isolated, though it's only 2 hours from Las Cruces. Maybe local civic fathers planted rumors to try to make reality happen.

Last time I was in Montrose was at the tail end of the Californication or whatever. As it was mid-Census, I didn't realize it had grown that much, though I did note the amount of traffic surprised me.

And, now, it's a puzzler. Why did the Californication stop? Was it entirely due to the housing bubble bursting? If so, why hasn't it restarted again, as it has in, say, Bend, Oregon?

==

Sidebar 2 —

Said job has been readvertised a month after initially advertised. Maybe others, like me, said "huh" about the dropping the wire but not dropping the pages, or other things?

Magazines are NOT the answer, newspaper owners / publishers

For community sized dailies, and even more nondailies, magazines aren't the answer to continued struggles. They're certainly not "THE answer."

Any county of less than, say, 50,000, from my experience, they should not be considered the answer. They may be a part of a partial answer. Don't expect more.

First, while you may get a few advertisers who say they wouldn't advertise in a regular newspaper, or even newspaper special sections, it won't be that many. Half of your magazine ads will be cannibalizing. Related to that, if a biz advertises in both that magazine and your newspaper, but has separate accounts on its books, it will suddenly hit advertising annual budget redlines quicker than normal, and leave you dry for the rest of the year.

Second, all of this was true even before the Trump paper tariffs.

Magazine slick, or even lower grade semi-slick, is getting even pricier than regular broadsheet. And, speaking of separate accounts, if you the newspaper publisher or owner aren't running separate accounts for the magazine yourself, how do you know you're not even losing money there?

Case in point from latest issue of a magazine within the eastern front.

A 15 percent adhole? And, since all pages are in color, there's no special charge for color ads?

The one after that was better, at more than 20 percent. But the one after THAT was 12 percent or so.

December 2018 issue? Worse. Flat 10 percent.

I'll be dollars to donuts, even with all content from salaried staff or John and Jane Q. Public, there's a 50 percent chance that first one lost money, and certainly the third one.

Let's also not forget that many of these magazines are given away free, even if they have a cover price that's basically purely nominal.

(Oh, and not all papers in the same chain do them monthly; papers twice the size only do bimonthly ones.)

"We're digital first!" No you're not

This is the most irritating bullshit slogan from today's newspaper world after the ever-ongoing "We're learning to do more with less."

The New York Times may be "digital first." But you, small newspaper chain owners of some five-day and six-day dailies, are not.

You're not digital first if you don't have a separate subscription plan for online only readers, rather than a single forced buy combo of print and Net.

You're not digital first if you cut the AP wire to save money, but then invoke that "more with less" BS by refusing to cut pages even with the Trump paper tariffs.

You're not digital first if most of your online advertising is nothing other than your print section classifieds.

You're not digital first if you haven't done the paperwork to figure out if you're close to digital first on revenue vs overhead.

You're not digital first if you're part of a chain and you don't train your ad salespeople on selling digital ads.

You're not digital first if your graphics person(s) at a daily paper have no real experience or training in building quality digital ads.

You're not digital first just because you post a podcast and video on your website, if you're not getting anybody to sponsor that.

You're not digital first if you see being online as a way to fill print gaps.

Saying "we're digital first" as a self-hypnotic mantra doesn't make it so.

To be successfully digital first takes thought and strategy.

Beyond the advertising and circulation side I mentioned, that includes issues of whether you want to post every story online first, at least in full story format. Even with word-count delimited paywalls, if I can read a header and 50 words of text, that might be enough for me to not need to read more.