Moser strikes again!

Just two months after the Sulphur Springs News-Telegram's parent, Southern Newspapers, was reportedly going to shut the press there and move the pressmen to the older press at its sister paper in Paris, Moser Community Media, which owns the neighboring paper in Mount Pleasant, has bought it.

With extensive time at Southern, and knowing Moser, here's a few thoughts.

1. Within six months, SS will move from a tri-weekly to a semi-weekly, as MtP is now.

2. The magazine in SS will cut back to bi-monthly, if not quarterly. I don't think Moser will kill it, but he's not a fan of mags.

3. Special sessions will increase.

4. The agricultural tabloid run out of Sulphur Springs, Country World? That could increase. Southern was complete idiots with it, never trying to get other papers in their chain to sell into it, then at the local level, eventually firing its long-time ad rep. Moser may well address the former head-on. I could see that bumping from 16 to 20 pages if done right.

5. Rather than a local magazine, with the amount of papers he now owns in NE Texas, the SS magazine might become something regional, and becoming a locally printed tab, not an outsourced slick.

Why did Southern buy Sulphur Springs in the first place? Per others, I agree that former Paris publisher J.D. Davidson talked them into it. Davidson is also responsible for the current ME being there, and many former employees wonder why. Stay tuned on that issue, as far as what changes Moser makes editorially. A person with long media experience, at a TCU journalism conference last Friday, was not impressed by the paper there, and I may be understating things.

==

Update: Within three weeks, Moser has whacked the six-page second section of the 18-page, 3x a week paper. The one section will print on three days a week, which cuts press hours. And, they're kind of upset on the press, especially since they may have lost at least one contract print job, for whatever reason.

Papers will now be mail only. Deadlines for the post office will be a lot easier to meet with just one section. But, that means contract carriers are all gone. It also means that circulation is very much a part-time position. Other cuts have been made or will be made.

I got out very much at the right time. So did others who left.

None of this surprises me.

I say that paper could be a five-day daily, especially with Moser running Mount Pleasant as well. Cross-pollination on news coverage abounds on sharing local news relevant to the other city, regional news that just one of the two papers can cover, etc.

And you could do this within a mail delivery system for the post office while getting rid of carriers.

==

Update 2, June 14: In six weeks, Moser has partially paywalled the paper, something Southern and its Deputy Dawg ITers, led by Greg Monroe, couldn't get around to doing in two years.