We Cry for You, Missoulian

By Jonathan Weber, 3-14-05

	Caption: The Missoulian, better known as "Big Blue"

It must be a crappy job, being publisher of the Missoulian these days.

Your name is John VanStrydonck, and you’ve toiled for years in the trenches of the newspaper business, and since 2002 you’ve gotten to head up a nice little daily in Missoula. It's a lovely town, and margins are fat. Unfortunately, though, readership has been flat for years, even though Missoula is something of a boom town. The help-wanted and real estate advertising isn’t what it used to be thanks to the Internet. All those new big box stores only want to do pre-prints, not display advertising. Maintaining margins gets harder every day.

There are pesky new competitors springing up all the time – new shoppers, new magazines, new online ventures. In the old days you wouldn’t have given a hoot, but now every penny counts. You figure at the very least you can make their lives more difficult by refusing to let them advertise in your paper, which after all still has far more reach than anyone else. You don't owe them any explanation. If a reporter calls to inquire about the policy - even a friendly and competent reporter like Jessie McQuillan of the Missoula Independent - you can always just hang up on her.

But it’s harder to control the pesky journalists in your own newsroom. They actually go out and do a story about one of those new competing publications, granting it far more publicity and business advantage than it ever could have gotten from the advertisement that you so shamelessly refused to run. But God forbid you try to tell them what they can and can’t run. It’s not like the old days, when the Missoulian was a wholly-owned mouthpiece of Montana’s copper magnates. Now you have to appear editorially upright. Reporters and editors can piss and moan, and run stories that undermine your business strategy. At least you can order the offending story expunged from the archives!

Back at headquarters, Lee Enterprises CEO Mary Junck and VP for western newspapers Greg Veon are not interested in your tales of woe. They are interested in keeping the margins up, because margins are under pressure at all their properties and that is not what Wall Street likes to see. They are interested in making the chain bigger – because size does bring some leverage in the newspaper business, and because CEOs always believe bigger is better – and they are focused on their recent deal to buy the Pulitzer newspapers. Problems in Montana, well, they don’t want to hear it.

Adding insult to injury, Mary actually engages a dialogue with one of the upstart competitors who has written to complain about the advertising policy. She tells him that Greg will look into it! (Ah, Greg, it really annoys you to report to him – you’re a VP too! – but at least your bio is above his on the Web site.) Thank God Greg had the courtesy to ignore the note.

He won’t ignore those margins, though, so you have to do the only thing that’s sure to yield short-term results: cut costs. You lay off some folks from your online operations. Even though you know at some level that online is the future, margins are a question for the present. Now, when someone makes a mistake and publishes a picture of a duct-worker from Libby with the online edition of a story about a media entrepreneur from Missoula, it takes two full days to get it fixed. This is very embarrassing and irritating to the editorial staff, and indeed to everyone who takes pride in their work. Morale is horrible, but so what. You have to make those margins.

You long for the days when a newspaper publisher was a community leader, smug in the knowledge of his power and position, magnanimous with would-be rivals and annoying employees. But those days are gone. You’re still one of the biggest businesses in town, but you get no respect. Everyone complains about the stories, and about how their ads don’t pull like they used, and about how the rates are too high.

You think you’d be better off plowing some of the profits back into marketing and community outreach and new product development, but Greg and Mary won’t listen. And then they have the gall to second-guess you when some two-bit upstart complains about your policies! The Internet, hah! Wait ‘til that Jonathan Weber finds out what online investment can do to those nice, fat print margins. He says he doesn’t have that problem? Well when he grows up and has a proper publication he will! Then you'll really show ‘em. [End of article]