Doug Ray Of 'Daily Herald' Named E&P's Publisher Of The Year

By: Mark Fitzgerald Doug Ray, president and CEO of the Daily Herald in Chicago's north and western suburbs, is Editor & Publisher's 2006 Publisher of the Year.

In the cover story of its April issue, published Monday, E&P observes that at a time of industrywide circulation losses and layoffs, Ray has shown how a newspaper can grow in America's new suburbs -- markets characterized by diverse demographics and fierce media competition.

The Daily Herald, E&P says, "is proving that a suburban daily can fend off a powerful big-city competitor and ambitious mid-sized dailies, take advertising market share from long-time category leaders, and grow circulation while the rest of the industry stalls -- all the while investing in the areas many metros are scaling back: journalism, production equipment and circulation service."

Doug Ray -- who in 35 years went from a reporter on the paper's smallest beat to its president and CEO -- gains E&P's top honor "for all he's done in bringing the Daily Herald into the big leagues."

The 150,000-circulation Daily Herald, Illinois' third-largest paper, has increased its circulation by 19.9% since 1995, a period when Chicago Tribune circulation shrank 7% to 630,535. The Herald has grown ad revenue by 10% in the past two years, growing well ahead of the Chicagoland market, and capturing the leading share of automotive advertising from the long-time market leader, the Chicago Sun-Times.

Much of that growth has been fueled by an emphasis on news coverage at the newspaper that has adopted the marketing slogan "Big Picture, Local Focus." By industry standards, the newsroom is "overstaffed" with 275 employees, some 60 more than the larger Sun-Times, for example. The well-designed newspaper offers much of what readers can get from competing metro papers, with much heavier local coverage that reflects a Chicago suburbia increasingly populated by recent immigrants from Mexico, Poland, India, China, and other nations.

While the paper was rocked like every other during the 2001-2002 newspaper recession, it weathered the bad times without laying off a single employee.

In his 35 years at the Daily Herald, Ray, 58, rose quickly in the leadership of a newspaper that has constantly reinvented itself as its suburban market changed. The Paddock family-owned Daily Herald grew from a weekly with a monopoly on its Arlington Heights, Ill., market to a thrice-weekly nearly run out of business by a five-day paper started by the Sun-Times.

During Ray's four years as CEO, the Daily Herald took its first foray into Spanish-language publishing. More recently, Ray has turned the paper's attention to pursuing young readers. "This has proved to be profitable journalism, too," says George Harmon, a former Chicago Sun-Times financial editor who is now an associate journalism professor at Northwestern University. "Just at a time when Wall Street is telling us, no, that's a bad idea to invest in journalism, the Daily Herald is really doing it ... and I think other papers could do it if they had the will."

A full-length profile of Ray will be available to E&P subscribers on E&P Online later today (see the "Print" section on our home page).