33: Columbia [County New York] Paper
Interview with Publisher and Editor Parry Teasdale, April 2009
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
A periodical is a publication that comes out in successive parts, intended to be published indefinitely. Until today, my guests on Periodical Radio have been editors of popular magazines and scholarly journals. I’m delighted today to expand the scope of Periodical Radio to another type of periodical, the newspaper. My guest is Parry Teasdale, former editor of the recently folded Columbia Independent. The newspaper was run by the Journal Register Company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2009. Parry is making an independent effort to give Columbia County, New York, its own weekly newspaper in the traditional print-on-paper format. The Columbia Paper just published its second issue. The survival of news organizations is a topic that has recently received a great deal of media attention, so it’s a treat to interview Perry Teasdale, who has a wealth of experience in the newspaper business.
Steve: Parry, welcome to Periodical Radio. Let’s begin by having you sketch the story of the demise of the Columbia Independent. Why did the Journal Register Company decide to end it?
Parry: I can’t speak for the Journal Register Company, and I don’t pretend to. I think clearly they were in financial problems, and they decided, based on some sort of formula or policy, to close papers that they felt were not performing to the extent that they wanted. By performing, clearly we mean producing the revenue that they were looking for. I think on a larger scale, based on the company’s subsequent bankruptcy, it showed that they had some real fundamental problems. Those were clear because they’d been chronicled in the press for some time. The newspaper industry in general was suffering from a loss of display advertising revenue, and still is of course right now. The real problem has been that they’ve found no way to replace that, and no way to stem the losses. But Journal Register Company had been on an acquisition, if not binge, at least an excursion into buying more newspapers from the time it started in the 1990’s right through the early or mid-2000’s. They made a bet, basically, on papers in Michigan. I don’t know how you feel about the future of Michigan as an economic driver, even back in 2004, but the company decided it was going to go deeply into debt to buy a chain of newspapers, and they did. Of course the economy turned sour, and Michigan was particularly hard hit. Basically what happened is like a lot of newspaper chains, the Journal Register Company found itself tremendously in debt with really no revenue stream that could service the debt. The banks finally called the loans, basically, and decided they would do it through “forbearance” and let the loans go for a while. But in any case, for a while Journal Register Company was really the poster child for the whole industry, and there was a lot of speculation whether it would be the first company to go bankrupt that owned a chain of newspapers. But then Sam Zell stepped in and made Journal Register look like a bunch of pikers when he bought the Tribune Company and threw it into bankruptcy a year later. So Journal Register kind of faded because it was a much smaller chain. In the meantime, they had daily newspapers that were probably, and still are, producing revenue. But the question is, could the weeklies (or as they call them non-dailies, because we publish twice a week) contribute to that. I think they made a fundamental miscalculation, but we could go there. Basically that’s what led up to it. It was clear the company was in trouble, but it was not clear how much trouble it was in or how they would choose to resolve it. One of the ways they chose to resolve it was to close a lot of small newspapers, mostly non-dailies. There were a couple of dailies in Connecticut that they threatened to close, and they found an angel to buy them. But they didn’t find any angels for the Independent.
Steve: And why have you decided to launch the Columbia Paper?
Parry: The Columbia Paper is an idea that basically coalesced in my mind as the Journal Register Company’s fortunes sank. But I didn’t do anything about it, because I felt that I wanted to be loyal to the Journal Register Company. They were paying my salary, and I liked what I was doing at the Independent. I did register a domain name the last day before they actually closed. We didn’t know until the day they were shutting down the paper that was actually what was going to happen. In fact, that morning, I guess it was February 5, 2009, the publisher, who was relatively new, came down the steps from his office upstairs and said, “You’ve done a good job, but the Company’s in financial trouble, and so finish the paper you’re doing, go home, and don’t come back.” I’m paraphrasing there, but in any case everybody was laid off, and everybody, it was over 20 people, they closed it down. At that point, I had the day before registered the Columbia Paper name as a domain name on the web. The more I thought about it, clearly the web is still, or even generally digital, is not a way to support yourself unless you’re Google. So you had to find a way to function to do news. I was very committed to doing local news for this community, which is Columbia County [New York]. I decided the way to do it, and the only model to do it would be through display advertising, and the only way you can do that is with ink on dead trees on countertops. So that’s the decision that we made to go ahead and do it. A lot of people who’d worked for the Independent were very eager to become a part of that effort, and they’ve really volunteered a lot of time, especially to keep the web site going. The web site was up and going with local news in less than a week after the Independent was closed. In ten weeks, we put a newspaper on the stands in Columbia County, and we just finished our second edition.
Steve: Is display advertising the only reason to have a print newspaper, or are there additional important reasons for doing that?
Parry: When you look at Columbia County in particular, and perhaps upstate New York in general--I can’t speak beyond the bounds of what I know of in the market--you see a skewed older demographic, and you see a lot of rural areas, and Columbia is primarily rural, where broadband access is limited. Now when you combine those two factors, you say, How do people get their news?” It becomes problematic to deliver it. You can’t deliver it through sophisticated digital services, because they simply don’t exist. There’s lots of places in Columbia County where you can’t even get mobile phone service or cell service. And there are lots of places and lots of people who have only dial-up access to the web. So that makes the web not very functional. The radio market is extremely fractured. There are daily newspapers coming out of Albany, out of Poughkeepsie, out of Pittsfield, and there is a daily paper in the city of Hudson. But they don’t reach county wide. What I’ve perceived in my time here is that there is a county wide market, there’s a county wide identity beyond market only aspects. People understand that they live in Columbia County, and they’re eager for news about what’s going on in their county. There’s no more practical way at this point to deliver news and information, which includes advertising, to this large group of people than a print newspaper. Part of that is also the business of being older. People who are older are more likely to be habituated to reading newspapers, and to be newspaper friendly and newspaper receptive. Where as you move to a skewed younger demographic, that’s a harder sell.
Steve: In one of the pieces Chris Churchill wrote about your Columbia Paper in the Albany Times Union, he quoted you, “People don’t realize how expensive it is to produce and distribute real news.” What do you mean by “real news,” and why is it expensive to produce?
Parry: There’s no algorithm that gives you news. You can aggregate news with an algorithm, with a computer program. You can go out and grab the news from other sources. But actually collecting the news, by which I mean you interview people, the practicalities of journalism, where you make judgments about what’s important and what’s not. Then you present them in a narrative form. That’s a function that we haven’t figured out how to computerize. Some people have tried to make it work offshore, and I don’t know whether they’ve been particularly successful in that, but I do know those efforts have gone on. But in terms of actually doing it, it takes human beings. Once you begin to employ a lot of human beings in any sort of endeavor, whether it’s manufacturing or news gathering, then that becomes expensive, because you have to pay them. You can amortize the cost of equipment, you can’t amortize the cost of human beings, and you need human beings to collect news, and you need smart human beings to collect news. And you need human beings who are actually interested in gathering the news, and have a sustained interest and commitment to doing that. Those individuals are not always easy to come by. There may be more now with so many people being laid off from news organizations, but still it’s a special group of people who are professionally nosy, and you need to find those people and cultivate them and support them and you need to pay them.
Steve: So far, in the first two issues, the Columbia Paper is a volunteer effort, correct?
Parry: No, the Columbia Paper as distinguished from columbiapaper.com, which was and has been a volunteer effort, the Columbia Paper is paying people. It’s not paying them much. We simply can’t. But we are paying people. I believe that if we’re collecting revenue for a newspaper, then we need to share that revenue with the people who make it possible.
Steve: The newsstand price is $1, correct?
Parry: Correct.
Steve: Where does that money go? I mean, if you envision that as a pie, what are the slices of the pie, and how large is each slice?
Parry: Well, I think it’s a moving target right now, because we’re really just getting started. But certainly personnel, the contributors and all the people who deliver the paper and make it possible, and all the people, again, it’s a hard number to pin down, because people come and go because they have lives and have to support themselves. Paying people is well over half of whatever the expense is. The printing, whereas it’s not cheap, it’s not the largest expense to do a newspaper. What we’re trying to do is make every issue pay for itself. Now there are certainly variations in that, because the newspaper business is cyclical annually. You find in the winter and at the very end of the summer, there’s very little advertising business. People are regrouping after Christmas in the winter. They’re getting ready for the fall and the Christmas season in the late summer, so the retail advertisers and display advertisers are less involved in the paper. Those economics dictate certain adjustments over the year. But basically, on an average, every newspaper issue has to pay for itself. We can’t build the costs in that make that impossible to do. We have to keep a cost structure that makes it possible to do.
Steve: The stores that sell the paper get some . . .
Parry: They get a percentage, a small percentage, but a percentage of the take of the newspaper, I mean of the cover cost of the newspaper. Then it makes it worth it to them. There are two advantages to stores. One is that they get a percentage of the cost, which they should, obviously, and secondly because it draws people into their establishment. If you’re a convenience store, and in several places I can think of in the county, there are two and sometimes three convenience stores or similar businesses at the same intersection. You need a reason for people to come into your store. If they know you’re carrying a newspaper that they want, then they’re more likely to buy coffee and gas and treats or whatever, lottery tickets, at your store than the neighbor’s store, which may offer similar services. We want to be in those stores, because people are looking to go there, and that’s a reason to bring them in. So that’s another thing we offer to the retailers.
Steve: Historically, local newspapers have played a very important role in sustaining an informed citizenry, which of course is essential for democracy to thrive. Do you think much about that historical context of what you’re doing with the Columbia Paper?
Parry: I think we need to keep that in perspective, because as you know and probably people listening to this know, the freedom of the press that was written into the First Amendment was not the press that we know today. It was not the New York Times or even the Columbia Paper. It was pamphleteers, it was people who were saying horrible things about each other and political figures of the time, and who were challenging the King of England and the British with screeds that wouldn’t classify as news today at all. It was that kind of really almost outrageous speech that our founding fathers really wanted to protect. We have in some ways toned that down, and made it into a business, and I don’t even know that it was even a business back then. I don’t claim to be a historian of the press. But I keep in mind that the press is not some fixed thing, and that the concept of what the press is is not final. It’s an evolving concept. I don’t think that the news as it was delivered in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century was better or worse, I just think it was different. I think what we’ll find in the next decades, and maybe even sooner, is that news and the presentation of news will evolve into something different from what we know today, and what we think of the news as it was depicted in movies and popular culture and television, and existed in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. It’s changing, and it’s changing more rapidly than it has in the past, and that’s disruptive. But I don’t appropriate to what we’re doing some sort of grand principle that is immutable. I think that we do need to be responsible, because I think that’s what I believe and we believe as we’re doing it, our audience wants. But I don’t think that’s the only definition of the press, and I don’t think that’s the only definition that’s going to drive the future growth of the information industry and the information business, because that’s really what we’re in. We want people to trust us as a source of information, so therefore we want to be worthy of that trust. But that’s really how I look at it, rather than trying to pick a fixed style or set of values that defines the press.
Steve: Do you know, is your independent effort to make sure your community has its own newspaper unusual, or is the same thing going on other places nationwide?
Parry: I don’t have nationwide figures, and the one case study that I’ve followed is the papers that Journal Register Company (JRC) threatened to close, and then were saved at the last minute in Connecticut. And they did close some papers, and there were at least two papers that opened in the wake of the closures by JRC in Connecticut. I think that a lot of people have realized, well some people, let’s amend that, have realized that the JRC, like a lot of corporations, now I don’t want to single out JRC as a particularly egregious case, because I don’t know them to be that, but I think they didn’t really understand what non-daily newspapers, community newspapers were all about. I think that was a myopia that affected the industry as a whole. They had kind of a skewed notion, and we could go into that if it interests you. But basically I think it will happen, because people in certain communities will understand that there are opportunities for properly scaled, responsive community news organizations to deliver the news through a printed product for at least the near future. That may change in the very near future. But I think for the next few years, especially as you look at more rural communities and communities that are skewed older like ours, that is a particularly desirable audience for a newspaper, and it seems to be supportive. It seems to be an audience that advertisers still want to reach. So all those things I think say yes, it probably is happening nationwide. It’s happening on a case by case basis. But I can’t really give you the figures, other than this anecdotal evidence from Connecticut. I would say also in Dutchess County where the JRC owned a string of newspapers called the Taconic papers, they all closed down, and I think there was one also in Putnam County. A number of small papers have sprung up or are about to spring up in that area, because those communities now have no local newspaper. So there are efforts. People besides me see the opportunity and they’re seizing it. It goes from very wealthy people to people like me, who just think it needs to be done.
Steve: A few months ago for Periodical Radio, I interviewed David Schimke of Utne Reader. During the interview he expressed an opinion that independent news organizations like Utne Reader may need to go to a non-profit foundation model. And on a related note the Christian Science Monitor has just recently switched from being a daily newspaper to being a weekly in print and then daily online. That one is underwritten by the Church of Christ, Scientist to the tune of $12 million a year. Do you think that a non-profit foundation model might be the way for many or most newspapers to go?
Parry: I think it was Mort Zuckerman talking with Charlie Rose on his Public Television show, and Charlie Rose raised that issue with Zuckerman, who’s the publisher of the Daily News. Zuckerman said, “I’ll be the second one to do it.” I think that’s really the, um, we’re all kind of waiting to see. Could that be the model? I’m skeptical, because I think that there’s something inherently different about delivering the news as a kind of thoughtful after product of once the news has happened, different from, say, radio. Now we have an example of a very successful public radio station, WAMC, and full disclosure, I’m on the roundtable every few weeks talking about local news with them, and I’ve had a long term relationship in that regard with the station. But by any measure, a station that can go on the air in Albany, NY and simply ask people for support and receive $800,000 within less than a week, three times a year, plus all its corporate underwriting, is by that measure very, very successful. I think that’s due to lots of factors, and I don’t need to analyze that, other than to say that’s one way to go. There’s certainly Mother Jones as another example of non-profit. I think that’s a way that some publications will support themselves. But I don’t see the model yet, and I’m not willing to wait around for the model to exist to take advantage of it. The better approach is to say, let’s see if we can use what the large corporations couldn’t work to their advantage, and repackage that in a different way from a business sense and make it work. Because I believe that small business and entrepreneurial spirit is an important aspect of what this country’s all about, and why not give it a try. If in the end it doesn’t work, then we try something else. I still think the community deserves to have good accurate reporting about it. By good I mean fair, and as comprehensive as it can possibly be, and to have a forum to discuss various community issues, and that’s another thing a newspaper can provide. So all those things that I say, yeah, maybe it will work. Maybe it will work better in a digital world. I don’t know. But I don’t want to wait for that to happen, and it isn’t happening with the exception of those rare instances that you mentioned, and maybe Mother Jones and a few others. That’s great if they can transport that model and make it more generally available to people. Not even available, but functional, to make it actually work. Well that’s great. I would love to do that. But I also think there’s another thing about it. We’re in the midst of a very serious recession, if not the verge of a depression, and we need local business to survive. We don’t have a better cultural model for supporting our society. If local businesses don’t have a platform to project their message, and that’s advertising. I’m not making any bones about it. If they don’t have a way to put that advertising out, how are they going to get the word out? WAMC is actually talking of having its underwriters talk directly to the public. That’s a form of . . .it isn’t advertising because it’s public radio, and okay we can debate the differenct of that . . .but basically that’s not available to all the local businesses. Or if it is, it doesn’t serve their needs if they have a sale that’s coming up or something like that. Really, even though we’ve got to change our habits as consumers, we really also need to know what advertisers are offering. Sometimes we need to buy things, whether it’s something to make our homes function or our lives better or we need to know the services of whatever, from doctors to lawyers to anything else. Newspapers can provide that as well. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a wonderful holy crusade to deliver advertising. But it’s a business, and businesses are an important part what we do. They employ people, they give people jobs, and if we don’t have a way to get their message out, then they suffer. Again, I’m not just saying that we’re some sort of non-profit service for businesses, we profit from that, too. But in the process of doing that, we want to hire people, we want to create jobs, as well. So there’s a symbiotic relationship that goes on there, and it always is problematic in terms of the ethical issues and the distinction between news and advertising and those kinds of things. Those are issues that should be explored constantly. But I think that’s part of the picture, to say, “Hey let’s not ignore the fact that part of the message of a newspaper is the advertising.” That’s very important to a lot of people in ways that not everybody considers. It’s not just important to the advertisers.
Steve: Parry, we just have a minute or two left. In conclusion, I’d like to ask whether you have any advice for young people interested in careers in journalism?
Parry: I think the best thing I can say to young people is know something, and know something about storytelling, as well. Those are the two things. There was a recent article about how journalism schools should teach more about storytelling. But I think it’s really important that young people who are thinking about journalism understand there are fundamentals. There are real practical aspects to grasp. But they also need to have a wider interest than just journalism, because they’ll know then what other people who have wider interests are thinking about and how they came to it. So journalism alone is a very good trade, but knowing something, learning something, having a passion about something is equally important, and I would encourage people to do it. I don’t think journalism is dead, but it’s going through a very painful transition, and it will be difficult to find jobs for a while. I think ultimately people who are good at telling stories and who are accurate and fair and have some grasp of the principles will thrive.
Steve: Parry Teasdale, thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio.
Parry: Well, thank you for inviting me.
Steve: The printed Columbia Paper is only available in stores in its home county in upstate New York. The online version is at http://www.columbiapaper.com/. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.