RECENT SALES OF PAPERS GLOW WITH RENEWED LOCAL TIES

Santa Barbara, N.J. purchases bring properties closer to owners

A drumbeat resonates throughout the land: newspapers are local, local, local. If that's the case, then why are so many run by absentee owners?

The relentless mantra of closer-is-better is not just a recent chant of top newsroom executives; it is heard in the advertising, marketing and circulation departments as well. The one thing dailies can do better than almost anybody else is to know the community (the exception: weekly newspapers).

Recent news bears this out.

The Fang family of San Francisco is proposing to purchase the Examiner and revive the moribund daily by making it a San Francisco-only paper that wouldn't seek to circulate much outside the city limits (see NewsInc. May 8, 2000). The argument of Fang opponents is that San Francisco needs a metro, but that flies directly in the face of current thinking.

The Fangs believe extensive coverage of the school board, city supervisor and other political activities will entice more San Franciscans to read the paper. And more San Franciscans reading the paper means that local retailers are no longer buying circulation in Marin or Oakland that they don't need (or want).

Within recent days, three newspaper transactions also added fuel to this particular conflagration: the Newhouse family purchased a group of dailies and weeklies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, pitting it against Gannett Co. Inc., which has moved aggressively into the Garden State in recent years.

The properties, previously owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group, include the Gloucester County Times in Woodbury, Today's Sunbeam in Salem and the Bridgeton News, and The Express-Times in Easton, Pa. Newhouse also acquired a group of 40 weeklies published in Union, Somerset, Warren and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey plus Northampton and Lehigh counties in Pennsylvania.

The Newhouses, the owners of Advance Publications, have decided in recent years to dramatically improve the editorial quality of their metropolitan papers (pretty much everyone concedes that the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Portland's Oregonian are much better today than they were a decade ago), nowhere is this more evident than at their Star-Ledger of Newark.

With the editorially conscious Newhouses soon to operate six of the state's 18 dailies, will this not increase the quality of journalism in the state overall? And how will Gannett, which owns seven dailies in New Jersey, react? By decreasing editorial efforts? Doubtful.

Earlier in July, in Frederick, Md., the locally owned News-Post was transferred from one branch of its family owners to another, thereby preserving one of the last iterations of the threatened species.

And last week, local resident Wendy McCaw purchased California's Santa Barbara News-Press from the New York Times Co. McCaw, a businesswoman and philanthropist, is the former wife of cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw. She has had a house in Santa Barbara for many years; she made it her in full-time home two years ago.

Though neither party revealed a price, NewsInc. estimates the transaction to be worth about $120 million (McCaw is said to be worth $1.5 billion). Competitors to McCaw's bid apparently included La Jolla, Calif.-based Copley Newspapers and the aforementioned MediaNews (which announced shortly thereafter that it is buying the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, Conn., from Thomson Newspapers).

Though the Times Co. held the News-Press to high editorial standards, it is tough to really understand the paper's community from New York, or Atlanta, where Times Co.'s Regional Newspaper Group was based until recently. Times Co. executives complained bitterly about the News-Press being a traditional community newspaper in a town with a standard of living more akin to a metropolitan city. In other words, the company had to pay metro-like salaries.

Are these transactions a trend? Not likely. But it's heartening that locally owned newspapers are not yet dead.

– David M. Cole, e-mail:dmc@newsinc.net

Inside ...

• Newcomer to publishing buys California's Santa Barbara News-Press
• Second quarter earnings season off to a good start
• Media General set to take media convergence to smaller markets
• Newspapers 2000 outlines perils, strengths of classifieds
• Readership decline may be easing slightly
• Biloxi and Fargo have a lot in common when it comes to ads
• Customer service? Let's just forget it
• Persons

From NEWSINC., July 17, 2000, Copyright © 2000, The Cole Group. All Rights Reserved.