Betting on David Black

In Frank Capra's holiday classic, It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart's character shouts out to a mob besieging the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan: "Potter's not selling. He's buying! Why? Because we're panicking and he's not."

The scene was meant to depict the chaos of a bank run during the Great Depression. For those in the newspaper industry, however, those words can be used to illustrate the growth of the Black Press Empire in the past decade amid the financial uncertainty plaguing the Fourth Estate.

Most people living in the Puget Sound region couldn't tell you who David Holmes Black is. But this month, around a million households in Washington will have a Black-owned newspaper land in their front yard, or those householders will pick one up at the local 7-Eleven so they can see which local kid won the Soap Box Derby or check the classifieds for a '77 Camaro.

Despite the extent of his media empire, Black himself has stayed out of the limelight. Wikipedia, the repository of all that is true and trendy, has only a single 94-word paragraph on the 62-year-old Canadian publisher. A Honolulu Star-Bulletin article in 2000 pictures Black awkwardly sporting a Hawaiian shirt after his purchase of that paper. In 2005, The Robson Valley Times, a Canadian community newspaper, called him an invisible giant and speculated about his lack of media coverage.

Telling is the fact that every time Black is actually mentioned in an article, usually a brief business piece recounting another of his newspaper acquisitions, an obligatory caveat is included that he is not related to fellow Canadian publisher Conrad Black, who has earned notoriety for his flamboyant lifestyle and run-ins with the law.

David Black admits he prefers anonymity. "We're not a publicly held company," he demurs. "There's no reason to interview me."

Situated in his office in Victoria, B.C., Black works nine-hour days, a good deal fewer than when he was younger, giving him more time to indulge his hobbies: sailing, golf, and tooling around in his old Jaguar. In person, a poker player would be stumped by Black's demeanor, because he lacks any tells. Munching on a cookie at his desk, Black downplays his past triumphs, giving the impression that it's no great accomplishment that his media empire is not only profitable but expanding while other newspaper chains are currently bleeding red ink.

"It's not rocket science," he says simply.

Black freely admits he doesn't come from an editorial background. He is a businessman with a degree in civil engineering and an MBA. Drinking his coffee in the morning—he takes it black, of course—he reads the Daily Mail, Canada's equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, as well as a smattering of financial Web sites.

In Black's office, there seems to be little in the way of extravagance. Throughout most of his career, the company was run out of Black's home, and when a phone rings at the current headquarters, odds are good that the caller, rather than encountering a receptionist or a recorded phone tree, will be greeted with a brisk "David Black" by the man himself.

"Where else are you going to get an organization where the CEO answers the phone himself?" says Manfred Tempelmayr, president of Black-owned subsidiary Sound Publishing, who has known Black for two decades. "No one is screening calls. He's created an organization that is very approachable."

This under-the-radar, laconic, conservative persona not only typifies David Black, but also is symbolic of the low-key community journalism he has championed. And while his business tactics have rubbed some the wrong way, they just might be the hope and future of a beleaguered industry.

The conventional wisdom regarding print journalism is that it is a dying breed, and that online media is the way of the future. Hence, newspapers across the country are axing employees like Paul Bunyan in a tree-chopping competition.

The excuses for such downsizing are legion: competition with blogs, cable news, and online classified-ad sites, readers' short attention spans, rising production costs, overstaffing, understaffing, liberal bias, corporate ownership, the decline of the American educational system, and personal digital assistants. You might as well blame it on the rain while you're at it, because one thing is certain: Traditional "dead tree" editions are a thing of the past.

Or are they?

The supposed decline of print media is not in fact an industry-wide phenomenon. Community newspapers have generally been profitable ventures for some time, and over the past decade have attracted the attention of media giants looking for publications that can positively contribute to the parent corporation's bottom line.

There are plenty of examples in the Puget Sound region of community remoras being attached to media leviathans. In 1996, the Washington Post–owned Everett Herald purchased Enterprise Newspapers, a chain of four community papers with circulations in Lynnwood, Edmonds, Mill Creek, and Shoreline. Similarly, The Seattle Times purchased The Issaquah Press in 1995, and since then has launched papers serving Newcastle, Sammamish, and Snoqualmie. Meanwhile, the McClatchy-owned Tacoma News Tribune operates a pair of weeklies, The Peninsula Gateway in Gig Harbor and The Puyallup Herald.