How times change.
This morning, after our early walk, I went looking to see if there has been any recent news about David Black and his newspaper chain, Black Press, which owns the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
I found very little in the way of recent news about Black’s newspaper business. Actually, only two stories published in 2019 turned up in my initial Google search.
An April 2019 column in the Port Townsend (Washington) Leader, called attention to the beginning of a newspaper war, as a Black-owned community paper was beefing up it’s local reporting and advertising sales in an area that has been dominated by the Leader. At one point, Black had suggested he was interested in buying the Leader, but had been rebuffed by the publisher at the time in favor of local ownership.
“A newspaper war. What side are you on?” was written by Scott Wilson, who with his wife owned and published the Leader from 2002 until their retirement in 2016.
Wilson portrays David Black’s network of community newspapers in Washington State and British Columbia as the new corporate giant now attempting to dominate and drive locally owned newspapers out of business.
Of course, back in 2001, when Black bought the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he was the little guy campaigning publicly against Gannett, the then-dominant national newspaper chain that owned the much larger Honolulu Advertiser. Black even bought up a shipment of a book, “The Chain Gang,” which told the story of another small Wisconsin newspaper at war with Gannett. Black gave out copies to large advertisers around Honolulu, emphasizing the benefits of supporting competition in the marketplace by advertising in the Star-Bulletin rather than allowing Gannett to succeed in establishing the Advertiser as a monopoly.
Wilson spins a similar tale, but now with Black’s own newspaper chain in the role of villan formerly played by Gannett.
Black Press and Sound have not shied away from newspaper wars with independent local papers in order to shrink their competitor or put it out of business. They have very deep pockets and are smart at the business. They’ve been through this a dozen times, maybe more.
Black’s model has been successful in Washington State, where the Sound subsidiary has purchased most Washington newspapers that have come up for sale in the past three decades.
The list of newspapers that were once independent but are now inside the Sound portfolio is very long, and includes just about every newspaper within a two-hour drive of Jefferson County. Among them: The PDN, the Sequim Gazette, the Forks Forum, all of the weeklies in Kitsap County from towns like Poulsbo, Silverdale, Kingston, Port Orchard and Bainbridge Island; all of the weeklies on Whidbey Island, where they bought what was the sole independent competing newspaper – the Coupeville Examiner – just to shut it down.
They bought all the weeklies in the San Juans, driving one independent paper out of business. They own the weekly on Vashon Island, most of the weeklies in Pierce and King counties; the daily in Everett, the daily in Aberdeen, and they have a daily in Hawaii and in Juneau. Do a Google search on Sound or Black Press and you can see the whole list.
You get the idea. Check out Wilson’s column to get his defense of local ownership and independent journalism.
The only other 2019 story my search turned up described the last print edition of the Black-owned Seattle Weekly as it transitioned to a stripped down online-only existence (“Seattle Weekly stops the presses, ending four decades in print and joining the web-only ranks“).
The story quoted David Brewster, who founded Seattle Weekly in 1976 and remained as publisher until 1997.
Sound Publishing and its Surrey, B.C.-based parent, Black Press Media, specialize in “keeping costs down and consolidating services,” said Brewster. Their strategy, Brewster said, is to buy up community newspapers “and then reduce the editorial staff to one or two.” The companies have “no experience with alternative weeklies,” Brewster added. Berger agrees. “Sound Publishing is oriented toward a kind of community paper that the weekly was never designed to be,” he said.
Such skepticism seemed justified by heavy layoffs in 2017, which reduced the editorial staff to two writers and an editor and was further confirmed by this week’s news. “The only remaining staff will include a web producer, part time social media position and a multimedia sales consultant,” O’Connor said in an email.
Still, few in the Seattle media world were putting the blame entirely on Sound Publishing. The city’s newspaper sector has been decimated by layoffs and closures as the traditional revenue models run aground in the new digital world.
And so it goes in our hard-hit world of newspaper journalism.
