Regional chain newspaper claims a piece of Warwick market
Last Tuesday’s edition of the Warwick Beacon featured stories on the groundbreaking for an intermodal station at T.F. Green Airport, plans for a new Warwick headquarters for Davol Inc., an innovative traffic-enforcement program, and the search for a new fire chief.
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The Warwick Daily Times, for its part, reported on problems with the city’s labor contracts, designs for a new Tidewater Avenue bridge, a small herbs-and-seasonings company called Wildtree – and, of course, the airport groundbreaking.
Two local papers, one city – no other Rhode Island community has that, at least not in the mainstream news market. In fact, it’s become a rare phenomenon across America.
In Warwick, the twice-weekly Beacon has seniority; it’s been around for more than a generation, and its publisher, John Howell, is a well-known figure throughout the city.
But about two and a half months ago, the Journal Register Co., one of the nation’s largest local newspaper chains and the owner of the Kent County Daily Times in West Warwick, decided to launch its own daily in Warwick, which has a population of about 87,000.
So far, said David Dear Jr., publisher of both the Warwick and the Kent County Daily Times, he’s “pleased” with the outcome. He stressed that the Times is not competing with the Beacon, which Howell has owned and run since 1969.
“We feel we are our own niche,” Dear said. “We’re a very local daily.”
Howell said the daily, which has a circulation of about 2,000, hasn’t affected the Beacon’s circulation – about 8,600, for the Tuesday and Thursday editions combined – or its advertising revenue.
“We know the area,” Howell said. “We have a bigger presence. It gives us more [news] leads.” As for advertisers, he said, “if they want to reach the local consumer, if they want an identity with the consumer, we give them that.”
Linda Levin, a professor of journalism at the University of Rhode Island, predicts the Beacon will continue to dominate the region in the short term, because “people have been reading it for years” and it’s difficult to change readers’ habits.
“I think the Warwick Beacon has a lot of good will it’s built up over the years,” said Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian. “It’s going to be hard for people to give up one for the other. A lot of people know John Howell personally.”
But Journal Register Co. papers tend to be “very tenacious and very aggressive in sales, in getting advertising revenue,” Levin said. “I see they will probably be doing the same in Warwick.”
Dear would not divulge the Times’ ad revenue, but he said the city’s automotive and real estate businesses are advertising at rates that are much higher than the company had expected. And there are some crossover advertisers from its Kent County paper, he said, who for years have wanted to have a presence in Warwick.
Financially, launching the paper made sense because of Warwick’s enormous retail market, Dear said, including two malls and the big-box retail stores along Route 2. From a news standpoint, he said, it made sense because “it’s a huge area. There’s news every day.”
The Providence Journal recently closed its local bureau, as part of a broader reorganization – and that, Dear said, created another “in” for the new daily.
Dear said the Warwick Daily Times has a special focus on high school sports, because generally, they are not covered enough. “An audience wants to read about the game the next day.”
Avedisian said the Times reporters are everywhere. “They cover a lot of events in the city I wouldn’t have thought a new paper would cover.”
Though they’d studied the potential of the Warwick market for years, Dear said his staff couldn’t publish a daily in Warwick until the Journal Register Co. decided to “put the money and resources and people behind it to make it work.”
The Kent County Daily Times increased its staff by 15 to support the new daily. Though the staff currently works out of the paper’s West Warwick office, Dear said they will move to a new location in Warwick soon.
Dear said the company has revamped both the Warwick and the Kent County papers.
Each has four sections, one of which is customized to its region. The other three are shared content for sports, features and classified advertising. Both papers also include state, regional and national news at a glance. Since making the improvements, he said, the Kent County Daily Times has seen a 5- to 10-percent increase in circulation, to about 3,500 daily.
Oddly enough, Howell and Dear are both members of the same 22-newspaper advertising co-op, the Rhode Island Newspaper Group (RING), which is managed by Howell’s Beacon Communications. Though the Warwick Daily Times isn’t part of the RING, it’s still an interesting situation, because RING generates ad revenue for other Journal Register Co. papers, Howell said.
“They help us sell ads,” Dear said. “We’re not competing against RING. We don’t see it like that. The RING sales team is part of our sales team.”
Howell said that, though it’s strange to be generating ad revenue for a competing newspaper company, the RING will continue operating as usual. “We look at the whole package,” he said. “The logic is really what is best for the advertiser.”
“Warwick is a big city with a tremendous amount of business,” Levin said. “Whether readers will add the Warwick Daily Times to the [Warwick Beacon], or stick with the Beacon, or switch, are three questions no one can answer at this point. … It will be very interesting to watch it play out.”
