Minority Teamwork p. 9

By: George Garneau

Black, Hispanic newspapers team up in Los Angeles area sp.

TWO CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY newspaper groups ? one serving mostly blacks, the other Hispanics ? are merging non-editorial operations to form what they say is the nation's second largest weekly group, Wave Community Newspapers.
The combination of Urban Newspapers of Los Angeles and Central News-Wave Publications will create an audience of 635,000 for the group's 31 weekly and twice-weekly papers, all feee, carrier-delivered broadsheets.
"We have two huge minority newspapers being put together with one footprint and common management," said Ric Trent, a principal of Urban and publisher of the combined group. He said only Journal Register Co.'s Sun newspapers around St. Louis is a larger weekly group.
"The only reason we exist is the lack of penetration in the Los Angeles area of daily newspapers," Trent said, adding that the area's dailies together reach 34% of homes in the Los Angeles area of dominant influence.
Of the homes that Wave Community Newspapers reach, over 80% receive no other paper, he said.
Trent described a merger that approximates a joint operating agreement between two daily papers, minus the division of markets and the predetermined profit split. Under the new organization, the two companies will divide profits according to which papers attract advertising, Trent said. The companies will maintain separate editorial departments, while other operations will merge, and one sales department will sell ads in combination.
He said the merged operations of Wave Community Newspapers will generate about $15 million a year in revenue from advertisers such as Jc Penney, Montgomery Ward, Sears, Target and grocery stores.
The merger will probably entail no layoffs from a combined payroll of about 120 employees, since the two companies have had links for two years, Trent said.
Urban is the successor company to Southern California Community Newspapers, which went bankrupt as the result of a lawsuit over a classified ad that allegedly violated federal fair housing regulations. Urban, whose majority shareholder is Carmen Varela, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico, serves mostly Hispanic readers. Wave ? whose audience is mainly black, while its ownership, the Hews family, is white ? helped resurrect Urban from bankruptcy by loaning it newsprint and helping with production.
Brian Hews, chief executive of Wave Community Newspapers, said the merger will give readers of both groups more and better information.
Under the merger, C.Z. Wilson, a former UCLA administrator, continues as publisher of Central News-Wave papers, and Art Aguilar, former Urban associate publisher and executive editor, becomes publisher of the Urban papers.
In the area's polyglot mix ? people tracing their ancestors to Europe, Asia, Africa and Spanish-speaking nations ? the combination of the two newspaper groups creates "a cutting-edge test" for minority-oriented media, said Trent, a former ad executive at the Washington Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Harte-Hanks newspapers. "Our premise is that these people are very important to advertisers."
The papers use a formula based on about 35% advertising, with the rest locally generated news and information.