Greetings From Central Florida

By: Mark Fitzgerald On a steamy early August day in central Florida, The Villages -- a mammoth development of gated communities for "active adults" 55 and older -- hardly looks like a battleground. In fact, it's downright placid.

Gray-haired residents glide noiselessly along pathways on golf carts, passing each other with a nod and a smile. A few folks amble slowly in the midday heat among the uniformly cute shops of Lake Sumter Landing Market Square. From the gazebo, a loudspeaker pipes the oldies program from the development's radio station, WVLG-AM.

But this perfectly pleasant place that calls itself "Florida's Friendliest Hometown" is a strategic stronghold in a fierce newspaper war being fought on several fronts, right in the middle of the Sunshine State.

Florida is where America's enfeebled tradition of daily newspaper competition came not to retire, but rather to regain its strength. There are heated fights throughout the state, between The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times in Pasco and Hernando counties; between The Palm Beach Post and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Palm Beach County; and between the Sun-Sentinel and The Miami Herald in Broward County.

"Florida has been and will continue to be probably the most competitive newspaper state because everything is right to make Florida a great place for a newspaper to do business," says Dean Ridings, president and CEO of the Florida Press Association. The economy is good, and the state continues to fill up with retirees who are the newspaper industry's most loyal customers. He adds, "Everybody wants a piece of it."

But nowhere is the competition anything quite like the battle raging in the middle of the state along the Gulf of Mexico's so-called Nature Coast well north of Tampa, and inland to Ocala. This once-sleepy rural outback is now the new frontier for Florida's restless development. There's plenty of room left for growth, yet it's already crowded with newspapers.

"What makes this such a volatile market is that we all cross over into each other's markets," says Gerry Mulligan, publisher of the Citrus County Chronicle.

In an office filled with the New York Mets paraphernalia of a transplanted New Yorker, Mulligan runs the Landmark Communications-owned Chronicle and an ever-expanding brood of weeklies and niche publications from Crystal River, a good 90 minutes north of Tampa even with no traffic. In the six counties they consider their market, the Chronicle and its siblings face competition from other good papers also owned by big chains.

The Chronicle's biggest competitor is the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times, which moved into Citrus County, the very northern end of the Times' market, when the Chronicle was still a three-day-a-week paper. (It went to six days a week in 1986, and seven days three years later.) The St. Pete Times publishes its own version of a local daily, a paper-in-the-paper called the Citrus Times. Not too far north is The New York Times Co.-owned Ocala Star-Banner, which in turn brushes against Tribune Co.'s Orlando Sentinel from the south. The Daily Commercial, not far away in Leesburg, is also in the mix, redesigned and recharged under its new HarborPoint Media Group ownership.


The Villages People

The Villages is not only literally in the middle of competition, it's also a player. Developer Gary Morse operates a media mini-empire in The Villages that includes a radio station, cable news network, commercial printing plant, and a daily newspaper as successful as the development itself. The Villages Daily Sun boasts a peak-season household penetration of more than 90%, which bottoms out to a still- astonishing 80% to 85% in the summer. In the March Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX, the paper's daily circulation was 25,655, up 15.7% in a year.

The retirement community's history can also serve as an allegory explaining the accelerating growth of central Florida's newspaper market.

Like most of central Florida, The Villages was the middle of nowhere for decades. (The place didn't even get its vaguely chic name until 1991.) As the 1980s dawned, it was still nothing but a glorified trailer park of perhaps 400 homes on 18,000 acres of grazing land and watermelon patches. But like Walt Disney in Orlando or Henry Flagler in Miami, Morse had a vision for all that land sprawling across parts of three counties.

Now there are about 40,000 residents in homes bought for as little as $75,000 or as much as $650,000, all clustered in tidy "villages" with such Glengarry Glen Ross-inspired names as Village El Cortez. There are more than a dozen golf courses, including ones designed by famed pros Arnold Palmer and Nancy Lopez. And that's just the beginning. Plans call for 32,000 more homes by 2014. When the development is built out, in 2020, The Villages will have 100,000 active adults puttering on golf carts among more than 70,000 homes.

The good news for local publishers is that the people filling up those former cow pastures and horse farms are voracious newspaper readers.

"They're great newspaper customers -- and it does help that the developer owns the newspaper," says Daily Sun Single Copy Manager Keith King. When new residents close on their house, they get the paper free for two weeks. Daily Sun telemarketers follow up, and just about everyone signs up for home delivery.

Competitors don't bother to hide their envy. "I wish I could build houses and make [new owners] buy the paper," Citrus County Chronicle Publisher Mulligan says with a mock sigh.

But his paper's trajectory has been pretty remarkable, too. Previously a tri-weekly, it didn't publish daily until 1986, yet it has managed to outpace its fast-growing home county, increasing circulation and household penetration every year since. With a daily circulation of 28,475, penetration now stands at 48% on weekdays and 51% on Sundays.

"I wish I could take all the credit for it," Mulligan says. "But with this market, it was sort of delivered to us on a platter."

Caught in the Riptide

This is no easy market, though. Newspapers have been burned expanding too fast in central Florida. At one point in the late 1980s, for instance, The New York Times Co.'s Gainesville Sun launched an expensive strategy of expansion from its core four-county market to 14 counties. Now it's back where it started.

Everyone tried expanding throughout the 1980s, and some got washed back home. The Star-Banner reached deep into Citrus County from the north. The Tampa Tribune came from the south and published a "Citrus Tribune" for much of the decade. "If you went to a big court case or a county commission meeting, you would very likely have four reporters from different newspapers there," recalls Jim Ross, Citrus County bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times.

By the early 1990s the Tribune essentially gave up on Citrus County, although discounted 50-cent copies of its massive Sunday editions still cut into single-copy sales for the Citrus County Chronicle, which sells for a quarter more.

The Ocala Star-Banner also pulled back, concentrating instead on its core market. The reason, says Star-Banner Publisher Bruce Gaultney: Ocala keeps growing. So does the 51,454-circulation daily: Its city zone penetration is 58% Monday through Thursday plus Saturday, and a near-perfect 98% on Fridays, when it's aided by 8,900 third-party sponsored copies.

"Instead of trying to stretch our reach geographically, we have focused on developing new readers in our home and secondary markets through changes in our core product, and through the development of niche products such as our three free weeklies, quarterly magazines and our Web portal," Gaultney says.

Diversifying to the Core

One part of that strategy is aimed at The Villages, where about 5,000 homes are located in the Star-Banner's core Marion County market, and the rest are in its secondary markets. Ocala distributes a free weekly called The Reporter that Gaultney describes as "intensely local," and therefore popular with readers and advertisers. The Ocala paper also recently launched a quarterly glossy magazine for Lake and Sumter Counties.

Creating many products not only distinguishes the paper from the competition, but also increases its penetration, says Executive Editor Robyn Tomlin. "We've learned that the daily newspaper is not the only way into a reader's heart and home," she says. "Whether it's through our magazines, weekly community newspapers, the SMC (Select Market Coverage), our business-to-business publication, or on the Internet, we find a way to reach just about everyone in our core market and many people in the surrounding areas." The SMC product, called the Ocala Star, is mailed to 20,000 non-subscribers in targeted ZIP codes.

Spinning off new products is part of everybody's marketing playbook in central Florida. Last year alone, the Citrus County Chronicle bought or created four new weeklies. This July, it added another one, its seventh. And just as the Star-Banner's weekly Reporter stabs into The Villages, so the weekly Riverland News puts the Chronicle in Ocala's home county.

The Chronicle "has perfected the 'hub-and-spoke' or 'cluster' concept as well as any group of papers," says Mark Mathes, who co-owns the seven-paper Community News Publications in suburban Tampa with his wife Diane. As executive editor at the Star-Banner from 1986 to 1993, Mathes says, "We competed as the Chronicle perfected community news coverage in its home county."

Getting Past the Gates

There is one product, though, that no one offers anymore. The explosive growth of gated communities -- and essentially every new development is gated -- have killed the free shopper tossed in driveways by inexpensive casual labor. "Paid newspapers definitely have an advantage with all the difficulties associated with free distribution [in gated communities]," says the Florida Press Association's Ridings.

Gates actually help dailies, says Star- Banner Circulation Director Miller. "We're allowed to deliver inside all gated communities in our market ... and they are typically more affluent and have higher penetration than other areas."

And though it might be to the advantage of The Villages to use its extensive system of gated clusters to thwart its own Daily Sun's competitors, the development lives up to its "friendliest hometown" slogan. "No, there's no restrictions," says Single Copy Manager King. "As a matter of fact, we delivered USA Today until a year ago, and were the second-largest distributor in the state." And the Star- Banner and Orlando Sentinel both sell at the development, he notes.

Of course, the papers hovering outside The Villages give the distinct impression they would bust through any gates to get the demographic prize inside. The Orlando Sentinel, for instance, is in a market that is growing, says spokeswoman Ashley Allen, "360 degrees, all around us." Still, she adds, "The Villages definitely is an important part of our future strategy."

Coverage of The Villages is directed from the Sentinel's Lake County bureau, which, with 38 employees, is the single largest concentration of journalists outside its main office, she notes. "We continue to look for ways to get content that is meaningful to them into the newspaper," she says of the development's retiree population.

The Villages Daily Sun's formula is pretty simple. They produce a paper that gives loads of news with numerous pictures of residents, combined with quick roundups of national and world news. And in a nice touch that Florida's snow birds love, an item from, say, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will end with that day's weather forecast for the city. And then there are the many activity listings, for everything from who's playing at the Lake Sumter gazebo that night to the upcoming Gary Lewis and the Playboys appearance at a club for residents only. "This community is based on entertainment and golf, and we try to meet those needs," says King. (Executive Editorial Manager Larry D. Croom and General Manager James Sprung did not return calls for this story.)

Editorially speaking, all the papers competing in central Florida are impressive -- and the small ones are far better than you'd expect for their size. That's one benefit of competition, says the Florida Press Association's Ridings: "If you're not a great paper, you won't do well here, because your competitor is great."

Rumble in Citrus County

If there is one constant competition in this shifting newspaper war, it's between the St. Petersburg Times and the Citrus County Chronicle. Each professes respect for the other. Both say they're not trying to be the other. And both say that being a metro like the Times is an advantage -- at least initially.

New retirees move to Citrus County "used to the Chicago Tribune and used to The New York Times," says Chronicle Publisher Mulligan, "and they look at the Citrus County Chronicle and say, 'This isn't the New York Times,' and we're not."

St. Pete Times Circulation Director Jerry Hill agrees that being a metro gives the paper a big leg up. The newspaper's Citrus County penetrations of about 21% daily and 27% on Sunday may be less than half of the Chronicle's figures, but they're impressive when considering how far the county is from St. Petersburg.

To overcome that, Mulligan says, the Chronicle has to be "the first one that gets to the customer." That's why, he notes, the paper sponsored 278 events last year, "And we sold newspapers at every single one of them. We do something everybody does, and that's community involvement -- we just do it three times as much."

Editor Charlie Brennan also tries to keep a news package that's distinguishable from the Times. Mulligan says, "You can never 'out-St. Pete' St. Pete. They're too good, we've gotta be us."

The Times throws a lot of firepower at the Chronicle in Citrus County: five full-time reporters, three photographers, two sports reporters, a full-time community news reporter, a part-time reporter, and two regular correspondents.

"The Chronicle is a good local paper," Times bureau chief Ross says. The Chronicle, he says, can overwhelm the Times with volume, such as a news brief for every police blotter item, but he argues the St. Pete paper does more in-depth and investigative pieces.

"We have more resources to draw on in those stories. We have those advantages, and we use them," adds Ross.

But with its significant circulation lead, the Chronicle's most pressing local concern seems not so much the St. Petersburg Times, but meeting the production demands that come with rapid growth.

"We are literally wall-to-wall," says Production Director Tom Feeney, showing a line of Goss Community presses with no room to grow horizontally, and jury-rigged with universal towers to keep up with color and page requirements. "No other Community in the country has so many things added to it."

By contrast, 40 miles away at The Villages, the Daily Sun production plant (located at the edge of the development, just like The Villages Hospice) has tripled in size in the last two years, says Single Copy Manager King. The paper is doing a lot of commercial work, even for papers as far away as Tampa.

"Our Community News Publications became aware of their abilities during one of the four hurricanes that barreled through central Florida in fall of 2004," Mark Mathes says. "They were one of the few printers with redundancy and power back-up. We became a printing customer soon after."

Whether it is housing lots, printing presses, or circulation, it appears that room to grow is never a problem at Florida's Friendliest Hometown.