Think Positive p.

By: John Consoli

Newspaper publishers are asked to stop accentuating the negative about the economic state of their business, are told things are turning around, albeit slowly
OUTGOING NEWSPAPER Association of America chairman Frank Bennack urged publishers this week to stop viewing the industry's present situation so pessimistically.
Delivering the keynote address at the annual NAA convention in Boston, Bennack, who is also president and CEO of the Hearst Corp., said such a viewpoint is "not necessary, nor helpful, nor correct."
"In recent years, many of our meetings have been like group therapy sessions," he said. "I don't need to recite the bleak advertising figures of 1990 and 1991 to explain why this was so."
But, Bennack said, life for the newspaper industry is "looking somewhat more hopeful these days. We had some slight improvement last year, and, although it is not coming fast enough or with as much thrust as we all hoped, that improvement does seem to be continuing this year."
Bennack said the "gloomiest days of the late, but not lamented, advertising depression stunned many newspaper people who in the soaring '80s had only one question: 'How high is up?' "
He said the past few "tough years" did have their beneficial aspects.
"I believe our industry now sees some advantage from the unrequested opportunity to struggle," he said. "We learned?or relearned?not only to develop new revenue sources but to better manage our costs.
"We learned?or relearned?the necessity of keeping our production and distribution capabilities up-to-date.
"We were awakened, finally, to the fact that is essential to develop strategies that will protect and expand our market share as an advertising medium."
Bennack said that those years "forcefully encouraged" newspaper
executives to "find fuller, more extensive uses" for their primary product: information.
"Those difficult years taught us that to survive and prosper we must deal with many new competitive challenges and must find new ways to do business," Bennack said.
He pointed out that newspapers were one of the last major industries to reduce staff size and probably did so at levels lower than most other businesses.
This, however, taught newspapers to exercise better control over costs and to learn to operate more efficiently.
That the recovery has begun, Bennack said, is indicated by the fact that overall newspaper advertising is up slightly and capital spending in newspapers for 1993 is projected to be up almost 14% to a total of just under $1 billion. Readership is also up in many markets (see the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations' FAS-FAX report on Page 10).
Bennack said that in 1992, there was a 1.7% gain in readership to almost 115 million daily readers and a 2.4% gain to almost 125 million Sunday readers.
"It is just possible that we are now seeing that there can be a payoff for the effort and money spent to bring new readers into our papers," he said.
Bennack urged publishers to be "more aggressively prideful of what is being published every day" in their newspapers.
Despite the signs of economic recovery for newspapers, Bennack warned that most would probably never again reach the "high-water marks" of past reader penetration. There is just too much competition today, he indicated, citing the increase in the number of hours of broadcast and cable television, the increased number of radio stations, the rising number of specialty magazines, the development of the VCR and the increase in mail-order catalogs and video business.
"In spite of it all," Bennack said, "newspapers have demonstrated the ability to hold and attract readers and to touch and influence their lives in ways no other media can match.
"If I sound more upbeat about our future than others, it is because I am convinced that there are days of success and achievement in front of us because we are going to do what it takes to make it so."