It’s almost like it’s better when you run your paper like you want to run a paper:
“Our overall revenue is more than triple what it was three years ago,” says Les Zaitz, the paper’s editor and publisher. “Circulation is probably double. We’re profitable, and there are not a lot of papers in the United States that can say they’re profitable.”
Things this paper is not doing:
Running a baseball team
Running a hedge fund
Running a money-laundering operation
Running a political party
Jesus Christ, it isn’t that complicated. This paper is finding out what is happening and telling as many people as possible in the most efficient manner it has found, without regard for whatever trends are being farted out at the Silicon Valley Innovation Festival.
Instead of flailing from the hyperlocal to the paywall to the longform to the DIGITAL FIRST PARADIGM PIVOT SHIFT, this paper is … being a good paper.
Which people will pay for, and advertisers will advertise in.
Schroder loads her white Dodge Ram pickup full of papers and rolls onto the streets of Vale. The tiny eastern Oregon town, population 1,900, is where the Enterprise is headquartered. Her stops include the county courthouse, a nursing home, a flower shop. The pickup crammed with papers is an upgrade from when she started doing this more than 20 years ago.
“That’s when I had a grocery cart and I delivered papers with my grocery cart full of papers,” Schroder says. “People called me ‘Bag Lady,’ ” she says with a laugh.
Now, using a grocery cart would be tough. On her Wednesday rounds, Schroder logs about 100 miles, traveling throughout Malheur County, Oregon’s second largest.
Her expanded delivery zone is one of the effects of a newspaper that has boomed in the past three years.
You mean if you PUT A THING WHERE PEOPLE CAN FIND IT, and deliver it when you say you’re going to deliver it, people will perceive that AS GOOD?
Someone stop the presses.
A.
The name Les Zaitz caught my eye right off. He used to be a reporter for the Oregonian, back when the Oregonian was a newspaper instead of whatever it is now. I dropped my subscription years ago, the chief reason being that the delivery person was purely incapable of getting the paper to me in the morning on my porch. Since then, the Oregonian has gone the way of Tronc.
Glad to see Zaitz is making a go of newspapering. Perhaps others will move into the information vacuums left as other once-thriving newspapers collapse under the weight of their own nonsense “innovations.”