As of today, The Times of Pawtucket has a total of two news reporters, three sportswriters and one photographer. Four of their colleagues – a photographer and three reporters – left last week after taking buyouts from the newspaper’s owner, RISN Operations Inc.
Its sister paper, The Call, in Woonsocket, already has lost nine people in news and advertising, but Tim Schick, executive director of the Providence Newspaper Guild, which represents much of both staffs, said he expects about a half-dozen more jobs to be lost.
Altogether, the Times will be down six editorial jobs, to about 20 (two copy editors were also laid off), and the Call, which also operates the presses for both papers, is down to about 40 so far.
Those who have left, as well as many outsiders, see the cutbacks as a death sentence for both papers. But Barry Mechanic, the publisher, says they are actually meant to save the Times and Call.
“They’ve been around for 100 years,” he said in an interview. “It’s our job to make sure they stay for another 100 years. The idea is to make them strong financially by providing excellent coverage and content to the communities we serve and great value to our advertisers at a reasonable cost to us.”
No one knew quite what to expect when RISN bought the two papers, along with the Kent County Daily Times, the Warwick Daily Times and the Southern Rhode Island Newspaper Group, for $8.3 million from the Journal Register Co. in February.
Formed specifically for this deal, RISN was an unknown entity in Rhode Island. But the woman who heads the company, Melanie Radler, is the daughter of a well-known figure in publishing, F. David Radler, who with his former partner, Conrad Black, built a media empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times, the London Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post.
Just three months after RISN bought the Rhode Island papers, David Radler was in the national news as the prosecution’s star witness against Black in his U.S. District Court trial for allegedly swindling Chicago-based Hollinger International out of $84 million. Prior to turning state’s evidence, Radler had pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud.
Meanwhile, news began to filter down to Rhode Island about Radler’s reputation for squeezing money out of his operations. As Chicago Reader blogger Michael Miner put it, “David Radler never saw a turnip that wasn’t a little plumper than it needed to be.”
But many believed there was nothing left to cut at the Rhode Island papers. Under JRC, which had owned the Times and Call since 1989, staff and resources had been cut sharply already.
“We thought we were stripped pretty much to the bone,” said Douglas E. Hadden, who joined the Times in 1989 and long took pride in the paper’s onetime ability to, as he put it, “cast an outside swagger” and compete vigorously in its circulation area.
(Hadden is among the three reporters who took the buyout, along with fellow veteran Kevin O’Connor and David Casey, an occasional freelancer for Providence Business News.)
The Guild’s Schick said RISN is engaging in “a different kind of squeezing.”
“JRC kept them functioning. Now what we’ve got with RISN … is amputation of limbs,” he said. “I’m very concerned for the future of these papers.”
RISN is not taking the same approach with its other properties, at least at this point. But Schick said the Times and the Call were vulnerable because they were barely turning a profit. Their circulation has plummeted, he noted, from more than 20,000 each in 1990, to about 9,000 each today.
Asked how things got this bad, Schick said JRC’s cuts reduced the quality of the papers and their relevance to local readers. There was also little promotion, he said, and “any effort to go into new areas has not been followed up with increased staffing or coverage.”
The papers’ readership is aging, and new audiences haven’t been developed as they could be. And financially, Schick said, the papers have been particularly hard-hit by the shift from print to Web-based classified advertising, which took away a major source of revenue.
Moreover, Schick said, the papers’ management has “alienated” the communities, so competitors – especially The Valley Breeze, a free tabloid started by publisher Thomas V. Ward in 1996 and edited by former Times managing editor Marcia Green – have sprung up and hurt the RISN properties.
In the same period that the Times and Call have lost circulation, the Valley Breeze’s has grown to 35,000 per week, plus more than 15,000 from two additional papers the company now owns, The Observer in Smithfield and the North Star in North Providence. Ward is a well-known public figure in the Blackstone Valley, and this year, he even stepped in to sponsor the Rhode Island Spelling Bee after its former sponsor, The Providence Journal, bowed out.
Even in southern Rhode Island, Schick noted, RISN’s weeklies face substantial competition, because local coverage is a thriving niche, and others see an opportunity to do better than the RISN papers. “So you have this unusually competitive situation in these niche markets where there shouldn’t be competition,” Schick said.
Mechanic knows the papers are underperforming. Asked about the Call and Times in particular, he said they’re “not near the kinds of returns that community newspapers like these should be returning,” though they are also “not in danger of going out of business.”
Mike Holtzman, who worked for more than 24 years at the Call, took a buyout, and is now a reporter at the Herald News in Fall River. He said Mechanic told a staff meeting that RISN wants a 15- to 20-percent profit margin, “from a paper that’s been bled for many years.”
So how will the Times and the Call move forward now?
Schick said there’s talk of consolidating the papers’ management structure, and maybe sharing a copy desk and a classified advertising department – though two separate papers still will be printed, reflecting their home cities’ distinct identities.
Coverage of surrounding communities, however, will be reduced, Mechanic said. He wouldn’t specify which areas might see cutbacks, saying only that “every community will have a certain amount of coverage, just not as much.”
Asked whether the staff cutbacks would hurt the papers’ competitiveness, he replied: “No. We’ve looked very carefully at the markets. We’re still going to provide the best coverage of local news and local sports of anybody around.”
And he added: “There were some areas we were covering with a full-time reporter that we were selling 300 copies in. You can’t run a daily newspaper that way.”
Mechanic said RISN is investing more than $300,000 in business and financial systems for the papers, buying new equipment, computers and software so, for example, classified ads can be accepted through the Internet. And much more, he said, still needs to be done.
“The papers weren’t losing money, but if you’re going to make these kinds of investments, you need the money to do so,” he said. “The game plan is to make sure these papers are around for at least 100 more years.”
Asked whether, as profits rise, RISN would hire more reporters again, he replied: “Absolutely.”
