Newspapers
In Roanoke, a mid-size paper's story
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 23, 2009 - 2:52:57 AM

With newspaper ad revenues and circulation in a tumble, much of the focus has been on large metropolitan papers, which have been hit the hardest by the economic downturn. Papers like the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have shut down, while others like the Chicago Tribune have instituted massive cuts. But mid-sized papers are also feeling the pinch, if not quite as deeply as their metro brethren. Many had been working toward refining their focus in recent years, concentrating more on local news and less on the national headlines readily available on the internet and other sources. The economic downturn has sharpened this focus, forcing the papers to decide where to devote their dwindling resources. They are also developing new programs for advertisers, mindful that they too have been hurt by the souring economy. One such paper is the Roanoke Times, the Landmark-owned daily that has long dominated its southwestern Virginia market. Earlier this year, the 90,000-circulation paper mandated a five-day furlough for employees, but it has continued to devote more resources to growth areas like the internet. Debbie Meade, president and publisher of The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com, talks to Media Life about how newspapers will change during the recession, how to keep employees focused, and how mid-sized papers are coping with the economy.

What has been the greatest challenge facing your newspaper during the recession?

Clearly, the biggest challenge right now is that our advertising revenues are down significantly in many of our major categories due to the weak economy.

Newspapers are economically driven, and therefore economically sensitive businesses. When the economy is robust, and the need to advertise is strong, our revenues go up. When the economy is soft, we feel that in our revenues, too, particularly in the classifieds--jobs, cars, homes.

When jobs aren’t being created or filled, or cars aren’t selling, our customers have no choice but to scale back their advertising. They don’t want to, but they must in order to preserve their businesses until the economy springs back.

Revenues that fall short of goal put pressure on our operating model, not so much if the shortfall is brief, but more so if the shortfall is significant or lingering, as we’ve experienced in the current recession.

What extras (attention, deals, etc.) have you offered to advertisers during this time?

We’ve launched a number of special programs and new products to better serve our advertisers and stimulate business. In offering specials, we try to emphasize frequency, ad size, product diversification and multi-media bundling, since those are fundamentals that work for our customers--and not just cut our rates.

The best example is our SNAP (Smart News media Advertising Program), a week-long program that bundles three days in the newspaper and 10,000 impressions on roanoke.com. We are able to offer a package discount and provide the best reach available in a week's time through this combination, allowing for the best result for our customers.

For larger customers we offer our “Ad Busters” program. Customers who run an ad of a certain size on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday can get a discount off their established rates. We set a limit on the number of discounted pages we’ll accept each day.

Our print salespeople also sell the online product, and we do a lot of bundling of ad packages across print and online, for greater convenience and affordability.

We’ve stepped up our marketing and promotions efforts, and we’re offering specific feedback to our advertisers gleaned from our customer research on how to make their ads more memorable and appealing. Our sales managers are doing more coaching and recognition of our top performers, to keep the enthusiasm high and to motivate their teams.

How much do you pay attention to the problems at other newspapers across the country?

People in our business often talk with colleagues. At Landmark, our publishers get together regularly at one of our papers, and we have conference calls to share ideas and suggestions. We encourage our department heads to have regular phone calls with their peers at the other newspapers. These are quite helpful and less expensive than traveling to conferences to learn how others do things.

While everybody is working against a down economy, the conversations tend to be focused on ideas and solutions, not dwelling on the problems.

I think it’s important to be aware of, but not focus on, the bad news that’s out there. Instead, we try to look for the lessons we can draw from what’s happening around our industry and use those to make better decisions ourselves.

Everyone would like for business to be better and for the recession to lift. In the meantime, our focus is on taking the steps to strengthen our business, now and for the future.

Have you had any layoffs? If not, how have you been able to avoid them?

Roanoke is a very strong newspaper market. Because of that, and because of the decisions we’ve made over the years to adapt to changing conditions, we’re in much better shape than most to weather the current conditions and emerge even stronger.

We have been able to avoid mass layoffs of the sort that other newspapers have had to resort to in order to align their costs with their revenues. Over the years, we’ve been known for having a much leaner workforce than peer newspapers our size, which is an operating strength. We continually examine our staffing structure, seek new technologies and new ways of working to deliver better quality and lower our costs.

In the past two years we have reduced the size of our workforce even more, mostly through attrition and other voluntary means, including a retirement incentive option in 2007.

We’ve actually expanded in some areas, too – for example, we’ve grown our online business significantly and added niche products because we’ve seen a growth opportunity in those parts of our market. Our newsroom is by far the largest and most respected newsgathering team in our market, and we focus on local news – the kind of reporting and information about our community that readers can’t get anywhere else.

Having a leaner staff base has been extremely helpful to us in this advertising downtown. Back in January, after the economy turned out to be weaker than we thought, we announced a hiring freeze, a wage freeze and five days of unpaid leave for all employees, top to bottom of our company.

We explained to our employees and to our customers that we were taking these steps proactively to maintain our profitability and strengthen our business until the economy rebounds. Our employees have supported this, knowing that we’re doing everything we can to avoid widespread involuntary staff reductions.

How do you keep employees focused at a time when the industry has gone through a rash of layoffs and more could be coming?

It’s hard, because there is a lot of uncertainty and unsettlement around us right now. Even if bad things aren’t happening here, it is unnerving to hear about difficulties that others in our business are going through. Change is coming faster than ever before, and as we all know, people in general don’t like change. We’re all feeling the need to be more flexible and agile than we were even a few short years ago.

This is where our organization’s progressive culture emphasizing performance, teamwork and collaboration helps. We do our work in teams, and we have a flatter organization structure with fewer layers, top to bottom. We communicate openly and honestly about the business with our colleagues, formally and informally, using a variety of channels.

I refer to the tone of these as realistic yet positive. We want to give our employees the information they need to be successful. And we measure and give feedback on our operating results across the company to continuously improve our performance. It’s a can-do approach.

In times like this, you almost can’t over-communicate, and it’s important to stay optimistic.

People take their cues from their leaders, so this starts at the top. Our department heads in particular do a good job of keeping our employees informed about how we are managing the business, responding to concerns, and keeping everybody focused on achieving our business goals.

How do you see newspapers changing during this recession?

I think we’re all trying to figure out how we can streamline our cost structure, which will ease some of the current financial pressures coming from the recession and then enable us to be stronger and even more profitable going into next year.

People and paper are our two largest cost centers, so you will see us trimming jobs to lower our payrolls and conserving newsprint in a variety of ways while still delivering a quality daily report to our readers.

You will see us gradually raise our circulation prices, in strategic ways to recover more of our costs and offset the decline in advertising revenues.

We’re also looking for operational efficiencies, so you’ll see us centralizing key functions, outsourcing work, or consolidating work across papers – for example, printing at regional print facilities. It’s all about gaining efficiency by thinking in bolder new ways.

What's the biggest challenge facing papers of your size generally right now?

Actually, we’re fortunate to be a mid-size daily paper, especially now. Newspapers in big markets are struggling the most. Medium-sized and smaller papers tend to be in more isolated markets, with less overlap, and our cost structure is lower.

We’re more of a large community paper than a metro paper, and that is a real advantage. We’re a profitable, well-managed company, and we have a high acceptance among residents in our area because we focus on local news.

We still have our challenges, of course, but they are mostly due to the economy. Because we write and publish the news, and our role is so vital in the community, our challenges might be more visible than most. But really, most every business that I know of is facing challenges. There are always big challenges in any business – it comes with the territory.

What role has the internet come to take at your paper?

Our web presence, visits and profitability continue to grow at an impressive rate. We have roughly twice the viewers of the nearest online media competitor in our market, a site owned by one of the local television stations. Obviously, the internet business is a big part of our future.