Back on the trail tomorrow, to resume the Buckeye Trail through Ohio, with high hopes and lots of energy.
I am rested, fattened up (ice cream for breakfast is a wonderful thing!), and ready to lug my pack up and down more hills.
Thanks to those who wrote or called expressing concern about how much weight I’d lost. I’m feeling fine and have gained back ten pounds and a hint of my old pot belly. Several of you recommended that I try a high carbohydrate gel as a supplement to my diet. I plan to buy some today. One of my pals who urged me to buy some said, “It tastes like shit, but the stuff really works.” Yum! Can’t wait to try it!
Didn’t waste my entire week off by eating and loafing around. Interviewed two publishers of different size operations. I’m trying to figure out why some small papers are thriving and others may be
struggling. This week’s interviews may shed some light on the question.
I talked with Jean Ellerman, publisher of the Grafton, WV, Mountain Statesman, a Monday-Wednesday-Friday newspaper with 2,700 paying customers. It’s located in Grafton, an economically depressed town in the middle of what used to be coal country.
Despite the loss of jobs and the continuing flight of young people looking for work, the Mountain Statesman‘s circulation remains constant, and Jean told me that her ad revenue grew upwards of 10 percent last year. Her advertiser base is local service businesses, legals (25 percent of total ad revenue) and retailers from nearby Clarksburg who need the Mountain Statesman to reach their Grafton customers. There isn’t much in the way of competition for ad dollars, and no competition for local news.
I also met with Bob Robbins, my successor, once removed, at the group of county seat dailies I once managed in Central Ohio. Circulation volumes and advertising revenues for Bob’s group are slumping, and reflect the trends of dailies in larger markets. Even though Bob’s papers are relatively small (circulation volumes range from 7,000 to more than 35,000), their performance characteristics are more similar to big market dailies than to those of the smaller weeklies I’ve studied.
Maybe the key performance variable is daily vs. weekly. Can’t be proximity to a big market. Bob’s dailies are near Columbus, Oh., and are struggling to grow. Chuck Lyons’ weeklies near Washington, D.C., are booming. Can’t be isolated markets vs. suburban markets. Lee Enterprises and Gannett publish lots of small-to-medium sized dailies in isolated markets that are losing readers and ad dollars. It may be
that weeklies are not feeling the competition that is eroding daily revenues and circulation.
We’ll keep talking with publishers as I plod along, and maybe I’ll be able to hatch a persuasive theory by the time I reach Kansas later this summer.
