Liberation journalism: a veteran editor says farewell to the world of dailies and finds happiness running a weekly in the home of baseball's hall of fame

American Journalism Review, April-May, 2008 by Jim Kevlin

This was different.

There were 600 newspaper people at the New York Press Association conference in Saratoga Springs in April 2006, ages 18 to 80, all races, men, women, straight, gay--whatever variation of newsperson you might imagine. English, Creole, Spanish, Hindi and more were heard in the halls.

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The energy could have lifted the roof off the old Gideon Putnam Hotel.

That was the first time I heard it: Weekly newspapers are the only growing niche in print journalism.

After a decade and a half at downbeat daily newspaper conferences, with fellow middle-aged white guys bemoaning ever-declining staff and predicting the end of journalism as we once knew it, this was heady stuff.

That Friday night at the gathering of weekly editors and owners there was a gala in the Hall of Springs. The band was actually good. And everybody danced. Play money was changing hands at the roulette and poker tables in a side room. The open bar stayed open--I'm told, having doddered off at midnight--until the last reveler left.

Things are going to turn out all right, I thought to myself as I hurried from presentation to presentation the following day, making sure to get a copy of all the handouts.

I had gone to the NYPA conference because it was starting to look like I would be buying the Freeman's Journal, a challenged but enduring two-centuries-old weekly in Cooperstown founded by Judge William Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper's dad. This is its bicentennial year.

Living in Norwich, Connecticut, where I had previously been the editor of Gannett's Norwich Bulletin, I had spent the past year exploring the non-daily business. It was a year of discovery.

Tom Ward, a refugee from chain dailies in Woonsocket and West Warwick, Rhode Island, told me how he started the free-circulation Valley Breeze with two colleagues in his living room in Cumberland, a growing suburb between the two aging mill towns. That was 10 years ago; in 2006, he had just moved to modern offices and was putting out an ad-heavy, 68-page-plus tab.

I spent a morning with Paul Bass, who after 25 years in print founded the online, nonprofit New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org) to cover the hometown news he perceived newspapers were ignoring. Using NPR as his model, he obtained grants from various foundations--to cover health-care issues, for instance (see "Nonprofit News," February/March)--and relies on readers' contributions to make up the difference.

Tim Ryan, president and publisher of the Westerly Sun in Rhode Island, instructed me in the benefits of "localness" beyond what a daily can provide. He had spun off four free-circulation broadsheets to attract very local advertisers.

There was no shortage of advice: from Ron and Charlotte Bartizek, who had owned the Dallas Post in Pennsylvania; from Tony Jones and Vicki Simons, who grew the tiny Roe Jan Independent into the countywide Hillsdale Independent in New York; from Gary and Helen Sosniecki at the Vandalia Leader in Missouri.

In short, it didn't take long to figure out that many brainy, ambitious, independent people had already done what I was determined to do. Bob Estabrook, former Washington Post editorial page editor, then the paper's chief foreign correspondent, clinched it for me: His three-decade association with the Lakeville Journal in Connecticut--beginning when he was about my age, 54--were the most satisfying years of his life, he said.

Along the way it had dawned on me: 90 percent of the businesses on any Main Street--pizza joints, dry cleaners, gift shops--have simply been priced out of advertising in the dailies.

And not because of the cost of putting out a newspaper; no, those hefty if shrinking profit margins are needed, not just for operating expenses, but to pay off massive debt and keep up the stock price.

Middling-sized chain dailies are looking to average $15 to $20 an inch for advertising; the open rate is often twice that. Working through the numbers, it looked to me like a weekly could survive, even flourish, at $7, $8 or $9 an inch. Bingo.

My wife, M.J., and I were looking into buying a weekly in New Hampshire, but it was pulled off the market. Two months later, the phone rang. "I have a little property in upstate New York you might be interested in," said John Szefc, the newspaper broker.

I had driven through Cooperstown while in college, picked up a copy of the local paper, the Freeman's Journal, and thought to myself, neat name. M.J. had taught at Cornell and loved upstate. Our younger boy, Joe, then 12, was a huge baseball fan. John is in law school, but it hasn't been hard to tempt him and his pals to visit.

It was a natural.

The newspaper's owners, cousins Michael Moffat and Lin Vincent, had rescued the paper when, challenged by a weekly product launched by the nearby daily, it had gone into bankruptcy in 1996.

As Michael's restaurant, the Blue Mingo, prospered, he had less and less time to devote to the Freeman's Journal, which was languishing again in a little red 1820s firehouse on Pioneer Street. Across the dirt parking lot was the oldest building in town, the stone store Judge Cooper had erected in 1789 when he moved to the shores of Otsego Lake--his son's Glimmerglass--and began selling land.