Betting on David Black

While daily newspapers are cutting staff, many small community weekly papers like the Snoqualmie Valley Record are doing quite well.

In "Betting on David Black," Don Ward writes for the Seattle Weekly about SVR's parent company, Black Press:

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.

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.