New Hampshire Newspapers Struggle With Problems Affecting the Whole Industry

The owners of the Keene Sentinel announced this week that they had to cut spending.

President Jim Rousmaniere says some of those cuts would affect the newspaper’s employees.

There’s a salary freeze has been imposed going forward. Also, all staff members at the company would be required to take a one week unpaid furlough during the year.

The paper’s owners said they are also suspending contributions to employee retirement plans.

But they assured newsroom staff there would be no layoffs.

The president of the Salmon Press in Meredith couldn’t make the same assurances.

The Salmon Press owns a chain of 11 weekly newspapers.

President Rich Piatt says managers cut staff last year to prepare for lean times this year.

We had two rounds of layoffs, I think we laid off a total of 9 people… 5 of them in March and 4 of them in early December.

Piatt says a 20 percent drop in advertising revenue. forced owners to cut costs

A couple of big categories have been deteriorating over the years. One is classified ads have been going to the internet where people can run them for free. And real estate advertising and automotive advertising has deteriorated as the housing crisis hit us and the values went down and buyers went away.

The owners of the Conway Daily Sun say they also have had to reduce spending.

Publisher Mark Guerringue says that’s meant making changes at one of his other papers, the Berlin Daily Sun.

We took one step so far and that is to in Berlin we actually reduced the staff by one and we cut out an edition. So we used to be…five days in Berlin and now we’re four days in Berlin.

Several papers around the country have cut out their Monday editions because that’s typically the weakest day of the week for advertising.

The owners of the Daily Sun papers and others around the state say they are looking forward to the day the economy picks up.

But Boston University Journalism Professor Robert Zelnick says he thinks papers face bigger problems.

He says people just aren’t reading papers like they used to…even though many have made themselves available on line.

It hasn’t worked and I suspect the reason it hasn’t worked is that people’s tastes have changed, not that there’s a used car salesmen somewhere who’s not doing well enough to advertise.

Zelnick predicts that many more newspapers will fold.

But he says he thinks big, national papers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal will survive.

Zelnick says he also believes local papers that focus on small geographic areas will succeed.

…I’m talking about neighborhoods, not even cities or boroughs or counties. And there’s some threshold evidence that these papers by focusing on the communities where they reside can provide information that is not there by the internet.

If that prediction holds true, many New Hampshire’s papers stand a good chance of surviving the recession because their focus is local.
The owners of the Conway Daily Sun have even bucked the trend of retrenching on all fronts in the rough economy.

They’ve recently started up a new daily paper in Portland, Maine.