Sam Houston is cutting and consolidating the news

 For those in the biz in Tex-ass, they know it's not THAT Sam Houston, but the guy who is owner and publisher of the Hood County News (Granbury) and formerly of both The Springtown Epigraph and Azle News.

Formerly? Yes, per the TPA Messenger, which ran a full column of Sam's straight up, he's merging them into something called the Tri-County Reporter. Springtown is officially in both Parker and Wise counties, and Azle is officially in both Parker and Tarrant. 

He's also cutting Granbury down to weekly while humble-bragging, or just bragging, that it will be as big as a typical StartleGram as a weekly. He already cut Gatesville to a weekly.

As for its brag to be "fastest growing paper in Texas"? I heard this from the horse's mouth, and pulled out old TPA directories.

A couple of years ago, Glen Rose, right down the street from him, had a 20 percent growth spurt. Kyle (Hays County Free Press) has had growth, before major loss. It's called "exurban population sprawl," Sam, as much as anything you personally may be doing right, or correcting what Jerry Tidwell was doing wrong or not at all. I have no doubt that your growth has probably plateaued.

Specifically, as I can't find a 2020 directory, we will have 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023 numbers.

Glen Rose 740 949 941 937

Granbury 6,338 5,573 5,213*  5,580  * = year of Houston's takeover

Kyle 2,861 3,106 4,359 1,978** ** Cindy Slovak-Barton, long-time publisher, retired. The implosion is surely tied to this, but in exactly what ways, I'm not sure. I've done other googling and I'll just leave it there.

Anyway? Sam is only at where HCN was the year before he took over. Glen Rose has plateaued again, but had a 25 percent jump from 2019 to 2021. Kyle jumped 35 percent between 2021 and 2022 after a 10 percent jump between 2019 and 2021. 

Sam? Flat from two years ago. Up 7 percent from last year, giving him the allowance of a full year of work.

Oh, and while we're here, Sam? Azle fell from 2,141 in 2022 to 1,932 in 2023. Springtown had a smaller decline. Gatesville, to give credit, has climbed from 2,351 to 2,769. That's a bit over 20 percent, and a puzzler as to why Sam isn't actually bragging on it. (It was at 2,640 in 2019.)

Anyway, there's the background. Should I remember, and should I be in a position where I can get it, I'll update this in 2024. 

Otherwise, I'm trying to figure out if the TPA really believes all this, or as with all the paid press releases through the Texas Press Service, it's just being a pass-through.

As for him cutting HCN to weekly? Don't get it, especially if you're bragging over increases in print advertising as well as circ (which he has). You're throwing away one of two issues of print ad revenue. And, I suspect those subscribers will baulk if you keep subscription rates the same.

Yes, I know that Louis DeJoy's continued rate hikes are hitting we newspapers hard, even with NNA's continued, and so far futile protests to Congress. (Have you tried Amtrak Joe Biden more yet?) I don't think they're hitting THAT hard, and newsprint, while up, isn't up THAT much.

Were it I, I'd keep both issues, but trim 2-4 pages from each.

And, speaking of that, the "Hood County News expands" in the header isn't true unless the 32 pages Houston plans to run is more than the total of the two previous days. And, I insist you count both issues' classified pages and everything, precisely because you're now eliminating them 1x a week.

Next, is there really that much room for that much more business news? If you're trying to localize national and state economic trends, that's not a bad idea, but I do bits of that already, expanding the monthly sales tax report and other things.

And, beyond that? At least during the school year, if I removed 1x a week of both classified and biz card pages, Wise County and Bowie would still be pushing more than 32 pages a week most weeks. In other words, this is blather. (And, while Wise County may be bigger than Hood County, Montague County most certainly is not.) 

Houston says nothing will change about subscriptions. What about single-copy pricing?Assuming you're currently a buck an issue, you charging $2 for the single one? Or if you're at $1.25, then $2.50? Really?

The rest of the column, to deliberately mash up metaphors? It looks like Houston has rediscovered sliced bread.

Scrutinizing the Epoch Times

Or, as I call it, the E-pooch Times, as in Screw the E-Pooch.

What led to this?

When taking back newspaper issue remainders to a recycling bin, I saw some other paper on top of material already in there. I knew it wasn't the nearby sub-daily, and at first thought it was the Snooze or the StartleGram.

So I pulled it out. Actually pulled two out. 

And, voila! Two issues, from last December, of the E-pooch.

First, the price? $4.50! Thar's gold in them thar suckers that have been born every minute!

Second, page count? 48 for one, 36 for the other, unless I missed a section on it.

Ad hole? A whopping 1/8 of a page that wasn't house or semi-house (Falun Gong classes, or a book about Falun Gong, that might not be under direct control of E-pooch but probably pass on a cut — the Shen Yun dance troupe is direct Falun Gong) on the 48 pager and ZERO in the second.

And, there's no way that many $4.50 suckers exist to pick up the slack. So, what gives?

The NYT in 2020 said the paper — but mainly referring to its online presence, obviously — grew bigly by betting on Trump and Facebook. Betting on Hucksterman would do nothing to boost a print issue. (The NYT missed that it's also bet big on SEO flooding and botting. If most of the top returns on DuckDuckGo are its own, I can bet what Google looks like.)

So, does founder Li Hongzhi have Daddy Warbucks money? Whether he does or not, he IS a fucking nutter:

In 1998 Li Hongzhi stated that he believes alien invaders walk the Earth and that modern science and race-mixing are part of their ploy to overtake humanity, and he has reportedly said that he can walk through walls and make himself invisible.

Even the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi didn't claim to be able to walk through walls like post-resurrection Jesus. 

Moving beyond him, Wiki says Robert Mercer shoveled the funds in from 2012-2016. Interesting that he is shown as disappearing just as the bets on Trump start. Supposedly wealthy Falun Gong practitioners help today, though the NYT piece note that some editorial staff (and former) were upset by the Trump pivot and things connected to it. 

Non-opinion editorial content, especially in the two issues I saw being Christmas week and the week before, seemed to promote old-fashioned small town America and Christmas spirit. Naturally, the Falun Gong cultural-religious DNA of a mashup of Buddhism (karma, the swastika symbol and other things from Buddhism's Indian roots), Daoism (the yin-yang) qigong (the exercises) and feng shui (the energy focuses, which could also be an appeal to Hindu chakras).

Bottom line? A unique version of pink slime self-foisted on top of a new religious movement. Not "news" other than it rerunning wire stories. Features, opinion, and religious propaganda.

Austin Statesman journos on strike

 Gannett New Craphouse (actually it was OLD Craphouse) journos at the Austin Stateless are on strike.  Good luck; in all likelihood you won't get a real win, and certainly not one that's long-term. Take the wage floor. Yes, the folks at the StartleGram got one from McLatchKey, as did Snooze staff from Belo. Know what? That was for full-time new hires only. That means one way around that one, of course. Nor, as far as I know, do such floors have a COLA for inflation. So, 10 years from now? Let alone 20?

Which is worse on single-copy prices?

 Is it CNHI (which currently stands for nothing, or Can't Nothing Help It, or Completely Nugatory Hollowed-out Investment, per its RSA ownership) charging $1.75 for a 14-page weekend edition of the Gainesville Register, one-third of which is syndication material, or it it ...

Cherry (Pit) Road Media, charging $2 for a 12-page midweek (Tuesday, and how long before it becomes nothing more than a semiweekly in print) Sherman Dumpacrap that's less than 15 percent ads?

For context in North Texas, Wise County Messenger and Bowie News, both semiweekly, charge $1 for both issues, and versus Gainesville, the weekender is usually at least 16 pages, basic amounts of syndication materials and one-third ads.

A nothingburger grad section in Mudville?

Er, Gainesville. Six pages broadsheet, 1 3/4 pages of ads, or a bit under 30 percent. Out in the country, on a slightly down year for us, we were still at about 35 percent on 10 pages, and without Gainesville ISD and Gainesville-based (for the most part) ads.

But wait, it gets better.

There was a note on the front page, saying this was supposed to have run in the previous Tuesday's issue (that probably was a day late cuz Memorial Day), an issue that, for whatever reason, I've not yet seen.

So, it was a reprint that went in their June 3-4 weekender.

But? Its date on the folios? May 27. Oops ... guess CNHI's version of Craphouse's pagination hubs screwed that pooch. (I've done that once or twice, but I'm not part of a corporate chain that, despite all the budget cuts, is supposed to be paying for more eyeballs.)

And, wait, that's not all.

A note on the June 3-4 weekender notes production problems, which is why it was reinserted there. And, apparently part of that was not printing one school's graduates. That was 2/3 of a page. But, you can't have partial pages.

So, in reality, that special section was supposed to be 7 pages.

But, of course, as we who came up in the print era of publishing know, you can't have odd numbers of pages.

So, actually, even with the biggest high school in the county, they had an 8-page special with less than 2 full pages of ads, or about 22-23 percent.

Did that get talked about at TPA?

"Public Notices" is now a TPA contest category?

 I didn't notice that on the Better Newspaper Contest entry form but TPA's Winner's Circle has it listed.

Hope it isn't counted toward the Sweepstakes. TPA dropping Special Sections from counting was a real puzzler.

Side note about CNHI's continued decline in circulation at its papers, even as compared to the general slump that most papers have?

Weatherford is in the same level of semiweeklies as Taylor, a level below Nac, and two levels below Lufkin, Granbury/Hood County and Decatur/Wise County.

There is no DeJoy in the NNA with the postal rate increases

 If only Postmaster General Louis DeJoy actually improved service with the higher rates. If only Congress listened to somebody besides him. If only Biden would replace him — remember when he was thought of as a Trump toady?

From the National Newspaper Association:

National Newspaper Association criticizes 
relentless postage rate increases
 

A House Committee that oversees the U.S. Postal Service today received a statement from the National Newspaper Association and others in a broad coalition of mailing and package shipping groups that criticizes the twice-yearly postage increases implemented by USPS. 
 
The Coalition for a 21^st Century Postal Service (C21), a group to which NNA has belonged since C21’s founding, issued a statement for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in response to a May oversight hearing in which only Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was invited to testify.  C21 represents organizations that amass more than $1.6 trillion in annual sales from mailing-related activities, which amounts to about 5% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
 
The Postal Service’s Delivering for America plan has driven total increases in Periodicals postage of around 35% since January 2021.  Any good news from the plan has been overshadowed, C21 told Congress, by “relentless, twice-yearly, postage rate increases endangering the Postal Service’s mail business and destructive to small and medium-sized businesses and consumers often considered the backbone of American employment.”

Meanwhile, publishers and other mailers have seen declines in postal productivity, slower mail and rising concerns about the sustainability of universal postal service.
 
Although the USPS plan, known as the DFA, has been in effect since 2021, this year’s hearing was the first attempt at oversight conducted by a Congressional committee.  The C21 coalition noted that the Postal Regulatory Commission, which has little power over USPS operations, had allowed the major rate increases while being able to exercise little influence over productivity declines.  C21 called for Congress to re-examine the regulators’ mission.
 
“NNA has not been alone in expressing anxiety over the future of USPS,” NNA Chair John Galer, publisher of The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Illinois, said. “At the root of the problem is the reluctance of Congress to take responsibility for its role in USPS’s current situation. We have rising rates, declining service and a postal system that is now trying to compete with private package delivery services while it puts its core mail function on the back burner. We have been experiencing the consequences of flaws in the DFA for two years now.  It is time for Congress to get back into the postal reform game.”