Please read this. For a little more background, Dolph is also a former president of Boone Newspapers, a close friend of mine and my father, and one of the best community newspapermen I've ever met.
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On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Edward VanHorn <Edward@snpa.org> wrote:
Dear Ken,
SNPA received this essay by Dolph Tillotson today and I wanted to share it with SNPA newspaper executives.
Have a great weekend!
Edward VanHorn, executive director
Southern Newspaper Publishers Association
3680 N. Peachtree Road, Suite 300, Atlanta, GA 30341
404.256.0444
Texas
reporter Paul Bryant, from The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, is
working on a story this week about community newspapers. Yesterday, he
sent questions to Dolph
Tillotson, the executive vice president of Southern Newspapers, the
Houston-based group of 15 community newspapers that owns The Daily
Sentinel.
In an email to Tillotson, Bryant asked:
“So,
what must we do? And how? Help me tell our readers why newspapers like
The Daily Sentinel are successful while the bigger publications are
failing. What makes us different
than the others? And, finally, how can we successfully integrate our
online products with the print edition? It seems that the industry has
struggled to answer that question.”
Tillotson’s
eloquent reply is the story that community newspaper executives
everywhere should convey to their staffs, their readers and their
advertisers:
I
think we should shut our ears to the buzz of distraction and focus on
what we do best -- tell stories, engage readers, help to build
communities.
Smaller
newspapers like their big-city brothers are struggling with change. In
fact, I think anyone in business these days is facing the same struggle.
Name a business that
is not struggling in 2012 to cope with the pace of change. I can't
think of one.
However,
it's also true that community newspapers face a different and somewhat
less daunting set of challenges than metro papers do.
Our
enterprises are smaller and more manageable. Likewise, our cost bases
are smaller and more manageable. In addition, our markets are smaller,
better defined and much easier
to serve.
These
days, the name of the game in the news business – at least as it is
practiced outside of Washington, D.C., and New York – is to be focused
locally. The cliché of the
month in our industry is "hyper local." Interestingly, community
newspapers have always been hyper local, something metro papers
apparently are just discovering.
There's
a practical reason for that. It is much easier to deliver a clearly
identifiable and highly localized package of information tailored to the
needs of readers in, say,
Nacogdoches, Texas, than to do the same thing in Houston.
Consequently,
most of our 15 community newspapers still operate at profit margins
that would be enviable in other businesses. Those margins may be less
than they were five
years ago, but they're still respectable enough to attract investors
and buyers for community newspaper companies. Actually, our company is
forecasting in the year ahead that our business overall will be a little
better than this year, and that's encouraging.
Having
said that let me also say emphatically that small-town newspapers face
their own challenges. The last thing anyone in our business should do is
to become complacent.
We
should be working every day to deliver more local news and commentary
across more different media platforms to more and more readers. We
should strive every day to tell
stories more completely and more compellingly about the communities we
serve than anyone else can. We should fight – and I use the word “fight”
deliberately – to inform, engage and even inspire readers as never
before.
Sometimes,
it seems to me that our industry has lost focus. Our publishers and
editors have been pummeled by the rapid pace of technological change, by
the media's fixation
on Internet competition, by the advent of mobile phone and iPad apps
and by the ongoing debate over whether or not to charge for Internet
access to our products.
With
those hornets buzzing in our ears, it's too easy to lose sight of the
fact that our job is much the same as it has always been.
The media platforms may change, but we are essentially storytellers.
That
mission – telling stories – is a function that is basic to the human
condition, and it has been since our ancestors gathered around campfires
in the days before writing.
It's still basic, and it's still vital. Community newspapers are the
one medium in the world that can give small towns focus and a forum, a
careful and caring focal point for discussion of the crucial issues all
communities face.
Certainly
it is our challenge to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. No
doubt about it. However, it may be an even more important challenge to
fight the distractions and
stay focused on job No. 1, which is to tell stories more completely and
in more compelling ways.
Our
company owns 15 community newspapers from Georgia to Del Rio, Texas.
Yesterday, more people read the content we generate, in print and on the
Internet, than ever before
in this history of those 15 newspapers. Even more will read what we
write tomorrow. That story is the wonderful news about community
newspapers that no one seems to be telling, and we should be shouting it
every day.
We
should not retreat, as some in our industry seem intent upon doing. We
should take a collective deep breath and fight back with all our heart
and energy -- fight back against
complacency and boring stories told boringly.
We
should focus on being the beating heart of each community we serve. We
must be the lifeblood of the dialogue and progress in each community. We
have to be not just competent
but passionate about the job before us.
I think community newspapers have the chance to thrive for many decades to come. The chance. The opportunity.
Whether
community newspapers seize that opportunity depends on how well those
newspapers are run, how vital they are. I can’t wait to see how that
story turns out.
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