"If you try to sell the Kent Reporter, you won't get that much pickup—maybe 10 percent," Black says. "It is better to give it away and be able to offer a better package to the advertisers than to sell to 10 percent of the homes and attract fewer advertisers. In the suburbs, that's the game."
In 2006, when the Reporter newspapers were purchased, they were mailed to homes twice a month. In calculating its bulk-mail rates, the U.S. Postal Service stipulates how much advertising and editorial content a newspaper can contain: The higher the percentage of advertising, the higher the postage charges.
Louisa Bertman
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This hampered the company's ability to sell ads, particularly those pesky inserts that are the economic bread-and-butter of the industry. So after the sale, Black's circulation team was tasked with developing a delivery strategy that involved hiring enough carriers to drop off 250,000 papers twice a week.
Black has successfully implemented this approach in Canada as well as with his Sound Publishing properties on the Olympic Peninsula, where advertisers seem to dig the notion that their pizza coupons or sporting-goods-store flyers will be physically delivered to potential paying customers, not lumped with the typical junk mail dropped off by the postman.
But the direct-to-home approach has not been without growing pains. In addition to high turnover rates among delivery staff, there is the problem of people who don't want the paper in the first place. At the beginning of the switchover, employees say the Reporter papers' phone lines were inundated by calls from angry homeowners wondering why these newspapers were getting left on their doorsteps. And hundreds of families going on vacation have returned home to find a dozen soggy papers wrapped in pink plastic sitting on their driveways, a sort of invitation to any would-be burglar casing a neighborhood.
Despite these difficulties, it is the promise that ad sales representatives are able to make to their clients—that their print ads and inserts will be seen by 80 or 90 percent of a target audience—that Black says makes the circulation model work. Acting as a sort of news/ink version of a Jehovah's Witness missionary, the Reporter newspapers will be at your doorstep, without fail, whether you like it or not.
For the time being, Black doesn't see any need to turn his focus away from the print editions of his papers. Providing readers with the tactile and olfactory sensation of ink on newsprint is still the business model that works for him. Although neighborhood Web sites and volunteer bloggers do provide stories on a touch-and-go basis, the main source of news coverage for rural towns and the suburbs is still the community newspaper.
"We will certainly grow on the Internet as much as we can," Black said. "But at the moment, the financial model that works is the print model."
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