The online news boom and the busted U.S. economy have combined to make community newspapers an endangered species. So how does Palo Alto manage to support three newspapers–The Palo Alto Weekly, The Daily Post and The Daily News?
The New York Times asked that question of the newspapers’ publishers, including FAC board member Bill Johnson, who is publisher of the Weekly, as well as President and CEO of Embarcadero Media which owns the Weekly and five other community newspapers on the Peninsula, in the East Bay and Marin County. -df
The New York Times, Bay Area Report
February 26, 2010
“In a Country of Monopoly Newspapers, Palo Alto Is Awash in Competition”
By MIGUEL HELFT
People in Palo Alto, Calif., frequently call Dave Price a contrarian. While they typically mean it as a slam, Mr. Price, the co-founder and editor of the Palo Alto Daily Post, considers it a badge of honor.
“We are contrarian, but there are good reasons to be that way,” said Mr. Price, whose newspaper opposes just about everything that the city government does.
Mr. Price’s contrarian streak extends to his take on the newspaper business. He started The Daily Post in 2008, as the recession forced further cutbacks and closings at many of the nation’s already suffering newspapers. And in a time when most newspaper publishers spend much effort figuring out how to profit from the Web, The Daily Post is proudly print-only.
“Giving away news online is a dumb way to do business,” according to its Web site, which does not post any news.
Yet Mr. Price said the Daily Post broke even within a year. “Every month, revenue goes up,” he said.
Mr. Price is not the only one defying conventional journalism wisdom. Palo Alto, a highly wired Silicon Valley community, is, too.
At a time when many cities struggle to support one newspaper, Palo Alto has three: The Daily Post, The Daily News, which began publishing in 1995, and The Palo Alto Weekly, which has a daily online edition and has been around since 1979.
This month, in the days after the crash of a small plane caused a 10-hour blackout in Palo Alto and killed three employees of Tesla Motors, the three papers, combined, published some 30 articles examining everything from the city’s response to the power grid’s connection with the city-run electric utility.
And in a city where laptops, iPhones and Kindles are standard issue, many residents still walk a block or two to pick up one of the city’s newspapers, all of which are free.
“It is phenomenal to go into a coffee shop in the morning and see people reading local newspapers,” said Ted Glasser, a professor of communications at Stanford. “These are manageable newspapers. You can read them in 15 or 20 minutes.”
Whether the competition amounts to an old-fashioned newspaper war or a skirmish between struggling outfits with bare-bones staffs is a matter of debate.
“This newspaper war is probably being conducted with very low-caliber ammunition,” said Alan Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes a blog about the industry called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
The three newspapers are small. The Daily Post, the smallest, has a newsroom staff of five, and works out of a cramped warehouse space near downtown that Mr. Price likes to call the most efficient use of 800 square feet in the city.
The Daily News, like many other papers, has been forced to cut its staff, and some residents say it is struggling to fill a hole left by the 2007 closing of the Palo Alto bureau of The San Jose Mercury News, which is also owned by MediaNews Group. The two papers now share articles. (MediaNews Group is currently in bankruptcy, but the publisher of The Daily News said the paper’s operations would not be affected.)
The Palo Alto Weekly also cut a few positions, mostly through attrition, and reduced its print publication to one day a week in 2008, from two.
Still, all three newspapers say that they are profitable and that they are here to stay.
There are many reasons Palo Alto enjoys such a relative wealth of news coverage. It is affluent and has a highly educated, civically engaged population. Its pricey real-estate market and other high-end businesses provide a relatively strong advertising base, even during a recession.
But the competition is also the result of the characters involved, and in particular the outsized personality of Mr. Price.
“The market hasn’t demanded three newspapers,” said Bill Johnson, the publisher of The Palo Alto Weekly, whose Web site, which attracts 130,000 visitors each month, is a virtual gathering spot for the community. “It is circumstantial.”
The circumstances Mr. Johnson refers to are spelled out on The Daily Post’s Web site, which summarizes the story of Mr. Price and Jim Pavelich, the co-owner.
The two men helped to start and run The Daily News in 1995. The paper quickly became known for a confrontational style critical of City Hall and government in general. It routinely printed the salaries of all government employees. The paper quickly increased its advertising base by offering discounts to advertisers. In 2005, Knight Ridder, the owner of The Mercury News, bought The Daily News. Mr. Price said the sale price was $25 million.
The purchase “was really not for the journalism,” said Anthony P. Ridder, who was then chief executive of Knight Ridder. “It was to provide additional ways for our advertisers to reach their customers.”
The following year Knight Ridder was sold and split, and The Daily News ended up in the hands of MediaNews Group, which also owns most other Bay Area newspapers except for The San Francisco Chronicle. The tone of The Daily News became more traditional.
“Most people in the community think it is vastly improved,” said Mr. Johnson, of The Palo Alto Weekly, which often publishes longer, in-depth articles, like a four-month investigation into high school sports.
But the changes at The Daily News were not to Mr. Price’s liking. He called its reporting “namby-pamby.”
Mario Dianda, the editor of The Daily News, said, “Our stories are fair and timely.” He said a lengthy article last week on the impact of a 22-year-old school desegregation program illustrated the paper’s mission “to provide quality community journalism.”
When Mr. Price and Mr. Pavelich sold The Daily News, they signed an agreement not to compete with it for three years. They started The Daily Post weeks after the agreement expired, and quickly resumed their old approach with its motif of salary lists. The approach may have had impact: Last year, Mr. Price wrote two dozen consecutive editorials sharply criticizing a proposed business tax. The proposal failed at the polls.
“The Daily Post has a pretty consistent negativism about anything that is going on in the city,” said Larry Klein, a member of the Palo Alto City Council.
Peter Carpenter, who has held various government positions, said he recently helped organize a meeting between residents and police officials in Atherton. Mr. Carpenter said The Daily News coverage was balanced, but The Daily Post’s headline read “Atherton Slams Cops,” which, he said, “says it all.”
Mr. Price said critics objected because The Daily Post was tougher than its rivals.
It is unclear whether multiple newspapers create a more informed citizenry.
“I think we have both more informed, and on occasion more inflamed, citizens,” said Mayor Pat Burt of Palo Alto.
But, he said, “it is a challenge if good segments of the community are getting much of their information from a source that is predominantly critical.”
Mr. Burt and others say, however, that it is good for the city to have a diversity of news outlets.
“I am really happy that we have all these papers,” said Esther Wojcicki, who heads the Palo Alto High School journalism program, the largest such program in the country. “I wish that kind of choice were available to more people in more areas.”