Newspaper Vets Accentuate the Positive

By: Jennifer Saba Silence is a public relations strategy guaranteed to sully a newspaper's image. Taking the zipped-lip approach can pave the way for others who are all too eager to do the talking for you ? bloggers, commentators, reporters. When asked about the state of their own company or the industry as a whole, publishers and editors often fail to speak up, and then carp that newspapers aren't getting a fair shake from the rest of the media.

But who could blame the poor reporter assigned to cover a newspaper, often times, their own, on the fly? It's usually sparked by an announcement involving one or more of the following: plummeting ad revenue, declining print circulation (though often with a rise in online readership), an attempted sale, a crippling debt, bankruptcy ? or even, as with the Rocky Mountain News last month, a very sad shuttering.

Randy Siegel was one insider tired of biting his tongue while getting punched in the gut. So were Donna Barrett and Brian Tierney and Jay Smith ? remember him? He retired from leading Cox Newspapers in May 2008 in what feels like a lifetime ago.

They decided to hit back with the Newspaper Project, an informal group that seeks to turn the conversation toward emphasizing the positive aspects of newspapers. And there are positive aspects. Readers of these pages know that, industry executives know that, but consumers, advertisers and even loyal newspaper readers need to be reminded.

So the day after the Super Bowl, on Feb. 2, more than 400 newspapers ran ads, courtesy of the Project, publicizing that daily readership is higher than Super Bowl viewership. "With 100 million daily readers, newspapers are a tremendous scoring opportunity," the copy read. At the start of March, another new ad was released, with the tag line, "Defending Freedom Daily Since 1776."

The Newspaper Project began as a conversation between Siegel, president and publisher of Parade, and Barrett, the CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI), which owns more than 100 newspapers. Siegel ran into Barrett in November of last year in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., while attending a conference hosted by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association (SNPA) where she serves as president of the board.

"We started talking about how newspapers are getting pummeled in the press," Siegel recalls over breakfast at the Yale Club in Manhattan. "The reports of our imminent demise are damaging." The longer time passes and fewer people address the negative news cycle, he adds, "there is more damage to sustain."

He is familiar with the fallout of such negative publicity. Sales calls, he says, have often required him to spend the first 10 minutes explaining to advertisers why newspapers were not dying, they were reaching more people than ever. He saw it on the road when he talked to publishers who were having a hard time recruiting skittish talent.

Siegel and Barrett concluded they wanted to do something about it. Says Barrett, "In a nutshell, it is this: We still have a very strong audience. We are suffering on the revenue side. We don't have a crisis of readership, we have a crisis of revenue." Besides, she maintains, increased unfavorable coverage only spooks advertisers.

After talking at SNPA, Siegel and Barrett decided they wanted to do "a more forceful job" backing the good qualities of newspapers. They touched base in December to set up a formal meeting. Barrett, in the meantime, reached out to Tierney, one of the owners of the troubled Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, and Smith to join her and Siegel at the offices of Parade in New York on Jan. 7.

"Donna asked if I would come out of retirement, so to speak," says Smith, who says he's a longtime friend of Barrett and Siegel. He says he couldn't believe how fast things were changing since he retired almost a year ago, and was moved to take action: "Good god, we are seeing a lot of our friends and colleagues being beaten up," Smith says. "We need to bring balance to the story."

The meeting at Parade's offices lasted about three hours, resulting in an advertising strategy and Web site. The budget was in the "low five figures," says Siegel. He and Barrett greased the wheels before the Newspaper Project's official launch by co-writing a call to arms published on E&P's Web site Jan. 14. "Sure, newspaper companies face serious challenges," they wrote. "But we also have serious opportunities to re-engineer ourselves as quality content creators for local print and online audiences that advertisers still desire."

The ads saw neither focus groups nor had the benefit of spit-and-polish. Siegel called upon his many friends at agencies and asked for their help for "next to nothing" to create ads targeted to consumers, advertisers and decision makers. The newspapers that ran the ads did so at no expense to the group.

The Web site serves "to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of news-papers," its mission statement reads. "I know many of my colleagues [enjoy] Romenesko," Siegel says of the popular media blog, "but I think the site has become a funeral dirge for the industry."

Some observers cried that the project is an anodyne served up to stubborn newspaper executives who refuse to acknowledge their illness. The day after the ads ran, the group was criticized in a lengthy blog post by Martin Langeveld, a former publisher, at the Nieman Journalism Lab. Langeveld rattled off a passel of grievances: The Web site is sanitized. The ads focused too much on print. It was too little, too late.

Helena Deards at editorsweblog said the ad's claim was mixing apples and oranges: "Combining print and online readership undoubtedly shows an increase, but this does nothing to counter the most common argument that it is print which is suffering at the expense of its online rival," she wrote. "Moreover, whilst advertisers are still continuing to invest there is no denying the fact that there has been a steep drop in advertising revenue this year." She wondered if the group's formation "stems from a genuine belief in their continued existence," or is simply PR.

Others allege that newspaper execs have no one to blame but themselves for their troubles. When Tierney appeared on the weekend NPR program On the Media, host Bob Garfield tweaked him by listing several reasons why newspapers deserve a bad rap: "For absolutely obvious reasons, because newspapers are laying off 10, 20, 30% of their newsrooms. They're retrenching in many ways, closing bureaus, missing debt payments, selling for dimes on the dollar compared to what they sold for three years ago. This is an industry that is financially in extremis in a way that other media aren't yet."

Garfield closed by saying: "Well, Brian, as someone who reads both of your papers every single day ? online, for free ? I wish you the best of luck."

Two weeks later, Philadelphia News-papers filed for bankruptcy to bolster the two dailies' long-term prospects.

No one involved in the Newspaper Project is denying that industry is going through serious challenges. Tierney, who has an advertising and PR background, says the Newspaper Project is not going to save the industry: "It's not the 'Got Milk?' campaign. My old agency was involved in [that] campaign and it took a year and $1 million. The important thing is that we get off our collective asses, and get moving."

Tierney wishes that happened a year ago ? and discloses that the Newspaper Association of America, which had retained a PR agency for the industry last fall, got waylaid for budgetary reasons. "It's not perfect," he says about the project. "It's a terrific start. I'm delighted that it's helping internally to get people's chins up a little higher."

Barrett said in response to the criticisms, "This small grassroots project was not designed to cure all the problems of the industry. It's an understatement to say that would be putting too much on it. A Web site was launched, an ad was developed and some opinions were shared. We are not curing cancer here."

Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post, wanted the opportunity to boost the medium; the Post ran the ad on Feb. 2. The industry, she tells E&P, "has never been very good at promoting ourselves and really good at telling the story of the bad things that are happening at newspapers. We are the only media industry I can think of that goes around saying the sky is falling."

The ad saw some impact in Virginia, where the Richmond Times-Dispatch carried it twice. After it ran, Publisher Tom Silvestri says, two of his marketing managers attended a networking session in the paper's biggest county; while there, they referred to the ad and the strength of newspaper readership. "It was news to people in the audience," says Silvestri. "You can never assume that your message about your own business is getting through."

The Newspaper Project is planning to create more ads and eventually broaden their placement in other media. Siegel, Barrett, Tierney and Smith say they would like to meet every other month in person; they communicate several times a week. Other newspaper executives also have expressed interest in joining the group. "This is a campaign for our future," Siegel adds. "We need to make our case to the American people and the advertising community as to why newspapers matter."