Scripps Owns Florida's Treasure Coast

By: Lucia Moses Three centuries ago, Spanish galleons carrying gold and silver coins shipwrecked off the 70 miles of South Florida shoreline known today as the Treasure Coast.

The name fits as far as the E.W. Scripps Co. is concerned. With three papers whose combined daily circulation is more than 90,000, Scripps virtually owns the Treasure Coast, a fast-growing strip between the Orlando and West Palm Beach-Boca Raton metropolitan statistical areas. Scripps' Treasure Coast ad revenue grew 4.5% last year, which was essentially flat for the industry overall.

Part of the credit goes to the consolidation of the ad-sales staffs, which has reduced overlap of sales calls, said Bob Brunjes, Scripps Treasure Coast Publishing Co. vice president and advertising director. Once-competing salespeople now sell ads for all three of its newspapers, creating a larger platform with which to pursue regional and national advertising.

While consolidation has made it easier for advertisers to buy into all three papers, editors are challenged to make the most of the common ownership while preserving the identities of The Tribune in Fort Pierce, The Stuart News, and the Press Journal in Vero Beach. Although each paper kept separate reporting staffs and flags, they have collapsed their news departments under group editors and increased story sharing. "The goal isn't to make it all bland and all one," said Mark Tomasik, group executive editor, "but there are some issues that are just common to the area."

Learning as they go, the papers occasionally make flubs in story sharing. Readers are justified in squawking, Tomasik said. "We have to get better at being able to swap stories out."

The Tribune and News carried identical sports sections one recent day. That's not supposed to happen, said Treasure Coast Sports Editor Mike Graha, adding, "The goal obviously is to produce sections that are specific to the counties we serve."

If the papers are perceived to be losing their local touch, though, a new trio of weeklies will be all too happy to exploit it. Steven E. Erlanger founded Hometown News last year, filling a hole created when the Tribune Co. bought a group of South Florida weeklies a few years earlier and folded the ones that served the Treasure Coast.

Erlanger claims a combined (and unaudited) weekly distribution of more than 80,000 in the Fort Pierce, Port St. Lucie, and Stuart areas. He projected the group will become profitable this year and said he plans to start more weeklies -- in Vero Beach, also Scripps territory, as well as in Palm Beach and Brevard counties over the next few years.

The weeklies have been a hit with small-business owners such as Janette Clark, who said the ad she ran brought in so much traffic that she had to move her Fort Pierce consignment shop to a bigger space. Until Hometown can provide advertisers with verified readership data, though, the group most likely will have limited impact.