In the dark and stormy night of American journalism — 5,900 reporting and editing positions lost at newspapers last year, according to the Society of American News Editors — a small but seemingly watertight shelter still stands: the humble community newspaper.
Long denigrated as a relic of old-fashioned, small-town America, community newspapers — loosely defined as dailies and weeklies with circulations under 75,000, though usually far smaller — have held up far better than their big metro cousins during the double downer of a collapsing economy and rising Internet competition.
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“Community newspapers are not in a crisis,” said Nancy Lane, president of Suburban Newspapers of America. They’ve been less affected by the advertising decline brought on by the recession and competition from the Internet. That’s because they never relied as much as metros on big national advertisers and classified ads, which have been clobbered by the Web and the economy. The SNA’s figures show that its members’ advertising revenues fell by just 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the same period of 2008, when ad spend for the industry overall fell 21 percent.
| “Hyperlocal news has not flooded online in a major way. It’s impossible because of the money and resources and time for a startup to come into a community and hire 10 or 12 reporters and make any kind of money on a hyperlocal Web site.” |
On the news side, community papers have also enjoyed some immunity. While readers can find a bonanza of free national and international stories online, local stories are a rarer commodity.
“Hyperlocal news has not flooded online in a major way,” Lane said. “It’s impossible because of the money and resources and time for a startup to come into a community and hire 10 or 12 reporters and make any kind of money on a hyperlocal Web site.” That leaves existing community newspapers free to milk their print cash cows while they monetize their Web sites, even as innovators try to create hyperlocal news sites with workable business models.
As a result, though community newspapers aren’t exactly thriving, they’re not tanking either, like the big dailies. Jobs at community newspapers have held steady, Lane said.
“By and large, the community newspaper industry has not had layoffs,” she said. “There have been a few exceptions. But I know of very few that have actually experienced layoffs, and I actually know of some that are still in a growth mode and have added new products and new positions.”
In general, family-owned community papers have fared better than those owned by publicly traded corporations that took on more debt than they should have and have been slashing staff across their media properties as they deleverage. But at most community newspapers, Lane said, when staff is cut, it’s usually by attrition, rather than by the mass firings that have become recurring nightmares at metros. In some cases, community newspapers are actually hiring — more often than not, she said, when they decide to develop new products and Web offerings. Some standouts: Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., a company based in Birmingham, Ala., that owns media properties in 150 towns and small cities; Rust Communications, based in Cape Girardeau, Mo.; and Holden Landmark, a small company in central Massachusetts.
Lean operations afford steady jobs
Though new digital ventures may create the most job opportunities at community newspapers, plenty of community newspapers still stress the old-fashioned virtues of reporting, writing and the ability to handle a camera — traditional hallmarks of the well-rounded community journalist.
| “When you go to newspaper conferences, everyone talks about what the next Facebook will be. We’re focused on giving the reader better content, giving readers something they can read.” |
In Fort Myers, Fla., for instance, where three former employees of Gannett’s daily News-Press left their jobs to form Florida Weekly in 2007, the emphasis is on writing rather than snazzy Web gimmicks, according to Jeff Cull, vice president and executive editor.
“Our people are total reporters,” Cull said. “They don’t have to go out and shoot video and write blogs. I am just not interested in what some 26-year-old reporter’s opinion is about something.”
Cull figures that his paper’s job is to analyze and interpret the news as much as to report it, and that his journalists can accomplish those tasks better in print.
“When you go to newspaper conferences, everyone talks about what the next Facebook will be,” Cull said. “We’re focused on giving the reader better content, giving readers something they can read. We don’t cover the usual PTA and Kiwanis Club types of things that most community papers do. We tackle the big issues and boil them down so readers can understand them.” The weekly also devotes lots of space to social photos and the arts. The feature-heavy content has led Cull’s father to describe the paper as a “news-azine.”
So far, the approach seems to be working. Even as dailies in Southwest Florida have laid off employees, Florida Weekly has hired more than 20 staffers and uses about 20 freelancers. Since the group began the flagship paper in Fort Myers, it’s launched a second newspaper in nearby Naples and a third in the small retirement community of Punta Gorda, which have brought additional hires.
For some, the obligation of employees to wear many hats at a community newspaper — for a reporter, for example, not only to report and write stories, but to tote a 35-mm. camera and, in some cases, a video camera — is a less attractive part of the job. But others see it as fun way to build career skills.
“Everybody does a little of everything,” on community newspapers, SNA’s Lane said. “As a result, I think you’re more well-rounded. You have more of a skill set. You learn a lot more in a shorter period of time because you have to, because there’s not as big of a staff. When Web sites were being developed and people had to become multimedia reporters, it didn’t faze the community newspaper staffs because they were already used to doing a little of this, a little of that. That attitude prevails at a community paper, which is much different from a metro.”
Despite smaller paychecks, bigger payoffs
There’s another big difference between working for community newspapers and metros, Lane conceded: pay. Salaries at community newspapers simply are a whole lot lower. Though the SNA doesn’t track pay scales, Lane contended that differences depend as much on geographical location and union representation as on whether someone’s working at a community paper or a metro.
Susan Mermelstein, an editor at The New York Times, enjoyed a whopping salary increase when she moved to the Times from the East Hampton Star, a weekly on Eastern Long Island, in 1986. Today, editors and reporters starting at the Times typically make about $85,000, she said. That’s two or three times as much as they could expect if starting at most community papers — even factoring in the recent 5 percent temporary pay cuts at the Times.
Beyond salary, there are lots of differences between community papers and metros, Mermelstein added, and community papers don’t always come off badly in the comparison.
“There is a very different sensibility,” she said. “It’s fascinating to see how The New York Times works. It’s fascinating to be part of that big-world picture.” On the other hand, “you definitely feel like a small person in a big machine at the Times, whereas you’re a big shot in town when you’re at a small community newspaper.”
As a reporter and editor at the Star, Mermelstein enjoyed writing about the many people in town she knew, though that small-town familiarity of course could work both ways: She fretted about possible conflicts of interest when she wrote about friends who happened to work in local government. But as part of the Star‘s small staff, she also got plum assignments she never would have landed at the Times: interviews with the folk singer Tom Paxton, the director Sidney Lumet, and the actor Christopher Reeve, for instance.
A friendly informality existed in the Star‘s office, a cozy old two-story wooden building across from a pond and the village cemetery. Reporters and editors brought their dogs to work. “That wouldn’t go over at the Times, if you walked in with your dog,” Mermelstein noted. The Times‘ expensive new tower in Manhattan has only added a “very corporate and sterile feel” to working at the big metro, she said.
“When you’re working at a small newspaper office like the Star, it’s like working out of your home, almost,” Mermelstein recalled. Yet all is not sweetness and light, even at community newspaper offices. At the Star, one famous anecdote repeated down the years and trickling to the far corners of the town tells of an editor hurling a pizza at a wayward reporter in a fit of pique.
Mermelstein doesn’t regret the years she spent working there, however.
“At the time when I left the Star, I actually thought this is the best job I’ll ever have,” she said. “And in some respects, that’s true. It really is in many ways a dream job.”
If that’s so, Jack Graves has been living the dream for many years now. In his 42nd year at the Star, his career path is almost a mirror image of Mermelstein’s. He started out as a copyboy at The New York Times, then worked as a stringer for the Long Island Press (a daily now long defunct). When he was hired at the Star in 1967, Graves was the sole reporter. He worked under the paper’s lone editor, Everett Rattray, on a staff that, including the business office, totaled six.
Now the Star has some 40 employees, including three editors, seven reporters, and numerous stringers and freelancers in far-flung villages. Even so, hit by Wall Street fallout and the real-estate recession, the paper recently trimmed staff salaries. Unlike the Times and many metros, however, it has not laid off anyone.
Graves’ boss and mentor at the Long Island Press warned him that he was “committing career suicide” when he accepted the Star‘s weekly salary offer of $140 (job benefits in those days also included a Christmas turkey). In his early years as a reporter at the Star, Graves wrote practically everything: obits, police news, a column called “Point of View” (he’s now written more than 2,000 of them), features, and stories about Jackie O’s eccentric relatives the Beales and their disheveled home in East Hampton, Grey Gardens. His editor, working in a cubbyhole at the back of the office, stationed Graves by the door, where he would “take the brunt of angry readers when they came in.” No one’s ever tried to slug him in his long career, though one opponent in a softball game threatened to run him down after reading a story. “I gingerly stepped off the bag after he told me that,” said Graves, who’s now the Star‘s sports editor.
Still, despite the low pay and other slings and arrows of the community journalist’s fortune, he’s satisfied that he made the right choice.
“It was a pretty place,” Graves said of East Hampton, “and I wanted a sense of intellectual freedom.”
He mostly got what he bargained for, he said: “It has by and large been fun. Where else but at a country newspaper can you write pretty much what you please? I never have regretted working at the Star. It is a writers’ paper. I write extremely long and wordy, and I get away with it.”
Though the pay has remained anemic over the years — Graves said his lifestyle improved markedly when he became eligible for Social Security checks a few years ago — the benefits of working at a community newspaper have included rewards beyond those of the freedom to write.
“You are such a part of the community,” he said. “Some people love you. Some people hate you. But they all know you, and you’re a part of the community. I think I’ll continue here until I drop. I can’t afford to quit. And I’ve had a chance to say what I wanted to say.”
Daniel Lindley is a writer and editor who divides his time between Naples, Fla., and Montauk, N.Y.
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