Community Key To Local Papers' Future

Cliff Richner’s family has been in the community newspaper business on Long Island since1964, when his parents bought two weeklies. Now the publisher of Richner Communications, Richner oversees 170 employees across 18 community weeklies and a shopper with 10 editions (last year, he also purchased the non-daily assets of the Philadelphia Inquirer as they were being sold out of bankruptcy).

Typically, Richner’s Herald Community Newspapers, which largely cater to towns on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., have a circulation of 5,000-10,000 and target the small- and medium-sized business advertisers now in the crosshairs of digital reps across the country. Having recently returned from chairing the Suburban Newspapers of America’s conference in Phoenix, Richner reflected on the challenges of carrying those clients across the digital chasm and how his business is changing to handle that task.

In an interview with NetNewsCheck, Richner discussed the need to hold hands with mom-and-pop businesses as they move online, why he’s not worried about Patch and how deeply-forged community relationships and unique hyperlocal content will buy community papers a little more time to catch up to the digital learning curve.

An edited transcript:

Daily newsrooms across the country have been struggling for years, cutting staff and dropping circulation. How are community newspapers hanging in there comparatively?

I can’t speak across the board; there have been some community papers with layoffs. We have really not cut editorial staff at all. On the other hand, we’re very thinly staffed. A typical paper of ours has a full-time editor and a reporter. Some of the smaller areas might have fewer resources than that. Riverdale probably has five people in their editorial department full-time and then stringers.

Circulation has mostly held steady. We’re mostly paid circulation, and like selling anything else in this environment, we have felt the effects of the recession a little bit.

There’s a perception among some that community newspapers have been slower to embrace digital than larger papers -- is this accurate? Within your newsrooms or salesrooms, what, if any, obstacles have you faced in the transition?

I think that’s generally true. There are some internal and external obstacles, the external obstacles being I don’t think the majority of small and medium businesses that we deal with -- the real storefront-type people -- are there yet in terms of their own understanding or need. In suburban New York, things change very quickly and we’re not doing nothing, but one of the challenges we face in new technology is customer education.

We did a test through Local Point Media and Zip2Save. Through that consortium, and we’re a part owner of that, we were one of five sites across the country to test in mobile technology two years ago, and again, the first challenge was explaining to people what we meant by mobile advertising. They’re not there. And if you’re dealing with people who themselves don’t have robust Web sites, you’re not going to be very effective.

Internally, I don’t think our challenges are any different than the dailies on a slightly different level. We just have much fewer resources. Like everywhere, my newsroom, depending on who you’re talking to, goes up and back from being excited about the new technology and the fact that this now lets us compete more directly with Newsday in terms of timeliness. On the other hand, they want to know how they’re supposed to do all of this and put out their paper without winding up working 24 hours a day.

How much of your own revenue is coming from digital right now? How do you see that changing within the next year? The next five years?

Our own revenue right now is in the 3% to 5% range. I certainly hope that some of these new products that we’re seeing will increase that. I’d love to get 20% in five years, but I can’t say that we see a clear and easy path to get there.

That said, I know we just signed up some larger Web advertisers. The marketplace has a little catching up to do, but it’s happening. I think it will happen steadily. Part of the burden is on us to provide better product and to help people. When you look at a product like [Metroland’s] ShopTalk, it does address some of the issues that we have. We’ve found if we don’t continue to hold hands with these people, even though the whole thing should be self-service -- we’re giving them just shy of a mini-Web site, coaching them -- they’re not changing things. They’re not putting up new menus. They’re not putting up specials every week. As one of the speakers [at the Phoenix SNA conference] was saying, you wouldn’t leave your store window the same for a year, and yet a lot of these guys don’t feel that way about their Web sites or their Web ads.