Yet the newspaper entity in Washington with the highest aggregate circulation is not the Blethen-operated Seattle Times and its affiliates, nor is it McClatchy, with its News Tribune, Tri-City Herald, and Olympian. Rather, it's Sound Publishing, a chain of some three-score community newspapers and shoppers that is a subsidiary of the British Columbia–based Black Press.
And, wouldn't you know it, the company relies almost entirely on dead-tree editions to get its message across.
Louisa Bertman
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Black got his start in the newspaper biz as a junior business analyst for The Toronto Star, where his tasks included researching different expansion possibilities for the paper. Subsequently, he purchased the Williams Lake Tribune from his father, Alan, in 1975.
The Tribune covers a small burg on the Caribou Highway between Kamloops and Prince George. It was here that Black, a Vancouver, B.C., native, developed the strategy that would become the cornerstone of the Black press empire.
"It is all about local, local, local," he says. "It works. That's what the market wants."
Black operated the Tribune exclusively for four years before purchasing his second paper from a husband-and-wife publishing team in the nearby community of Ashcroft who wanted to retire. Black already published their paper on his press, so the deal was a natural.
"It became apparent right away, even to slow-moving guys like ourselves, that this was a decent way to make our business a bit bigger and make money," Black recalls.
After the first few acquisitions, Black Press grew at an exponential rate. "There was never a big plan to get big," Black insists. "It's just that another opportunity would come over the hill. Usually an independent would phone, wanting to retire or sell out, asking if we were interested in buying them."
Soon Black had formed newspaper clusters around Victoria and Vancouver. In 1991, the chain moved south of the border, when Sound Publishing was formed after Black purchased three newspapers on the Kitsap Peninsula. Since then the brand has become one of the dominant forces on the calmer side of Puget Sound, with papers in the San Juan Islands and on the Olympic Peninsula being incorporated into the Sound Publishing fiefdom.
It's from tiny seeds like this that mighty maple trees grow: All told, more than 170 publications have been added to Black's corral, including three dailies. In 2000, he rescued Honolulu Star-Bulletin from certain demise due to a joint-operating-agreement feud with the island's larger Gannett-run daily. The Akron Beacon Journal, divested by McClatchy after the breakup of the Knight-Ridder chain, was also bought for $165 million. Then in July 2006, Black scooped up the Little Nickel and Nickel Ads Classifieds from Lee Enterprises, which owns 53 daily newspapers, for less than $50 million.
A couple of months later, The King County Journal, along with its press operations and constellation of community papers, was absorbed by Black. Despite the subsequent dissolution of the flagship KCJ and its press facility, Sound Publishing tripled its operating size in the Puget Sound region with the purchase.
After Black's purchase of King County Journal Newspapers, local news reports focused on the daily KCJ. Lost in the myopic coverage was the fact that Black's primary motive was to acquire the chain's Reporter newspapers, a dozen community weeklies and biweeklies based in East and South King County (I was once a staff writer for the Reporter newspapers, though well before Black's purchase).
Yet Black says he spoke with the chain's former owner, Pete Horvitz, about how to keep the flagship afloat, to no avail. "Unfortunately, we had to give up on [the KCJ], which was not our first choice," Black claims. "With hindsight, we were fortunate to have made that decision early on, because today it would really be hemorrhaging. The daily industry is not good now, and being the third daily in the market would be a recipe for losing money."
"He has created a tremendous amount of circulation and produces [papers] at a low cost," says Horvitz, who still owns Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles. "It is good for local journalism because they are covering local news in the community and doing it profitably. As the result of the resources that he has, those operations are able to be successful, while on their own without economies of scale, they couldn't."
Sound Publishing president Tempelmayr, who has worked with Black Press since he sold his independent newspaper on Vancouver Island to the chain in 1984, states that consolidation is hardly unique to newspapers. Read the headlines on any business page, he says, which are dotted with stories of mergers involving broadcast entities, banks, grocery stores, automobile manufacturers, and countless other industries.
"The challenge is to find any sector of business that is not being consolidated," Tempelmayr says. "The fact is the number of choices will decline; the publishing industry is no different."
Tempelmayr says Black generally doesn't like to meddle with the editorial side of his papers. For the most part, he doesn't even read the vast majority of his papers, a task he outsources to his son Frasier. With more than 100 newspapers, doing so would probably take up most of Black's day. He says his local newsrooms are quasi-independent entities whose only directive is to cover local news as they see fit.
