Lugging the Star-Telegram on your back every day is a heavy burden.
It’s Bud Kennedy’s version of, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.”
There are many days in this city when Bud is all we have for local news and he’s a guy who knows the city, loves the city, and loves newspapers.
Once when he lived alone, Bud had a room stacked floor to ceiling with vintage copies of the Star-Telegram, his own personal history not only of the fabled newspaper Amon Carter built but also of the city it chronicled.
Late at night when Star-Telegram revelers repaired to Bud’s place they could thumb through his collection and wallow in the pure joy of journalism done the old-fashioned way, without trepidation and far-away corporate bosses trying to tell a local newspaper how to be local.
These days, as employees one by one and sometimes in droves are shown the door at the Star-Telegram, there’s Bud writing about everything from guacamole to gun control, flooding Facebook and other social media with links to stories of importance about his hometown, reminding readers that the woman in the obituary once was the most “connected” person in town – a somebody – and then he’s on television dissecting political issues and analyzing the latest vote.
Like a lone soldier he proudly marches down Main Street carrying the Star-Telegram banner, a tattered flag billowing listlessly as it is shredded piece-by-piece by media executives in California strategizing how to give Fort Worth chicken broth and make it look like real soup.
Bud is all we’ve got left of local journalism in the Star-Telegram, a mere shadow of its former self. Once a great newspaper, now mostly bones. No meat.
Bud Kennedy has been the model of stability and reliability at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for decades. He is highly competent and deft at his job but one has to wonder just how long he can keep the franchise alive.
Everywhere you go, the chorus rises to crescendo: What’s happened to the Star-Telegram? Can’t a white knight come along to save it?
The short answer: No.
The Star-Telegram’s corporate owner, McClatchy, paid the going rate for the paper as part of its purchase of the former Knight Ridder chain but as the economy burst in 2008 the price it paid was then too much.
So, McClatchy can’t afford to sell the Star-Telegram or other papers because it cannot come close to paying back its loans. The Star-Telegram was valued at $600 million when it sold; now it might fetch $50 million to $75 million, but maybe less.
That said, there is no excuse for the Star-Telegram to be as bad as it is, even in these difficult times. When I pick it up on a Monday and it totals 16 pages, I sigh. A few weeks back the lead story was about the Masters golf tournament. Most of us have televisions; we watched the Masters the day before.
A discerning editor who I know well just returned from several weeks in Abilene only to report that the daily newspaper there is better than the Star-Telegram.
Writing about the shrinkage of the Star-Telegram hardly brings me glee. The paper brought me to Fort Worth in 1986 as its president and publisher and I will be forever grateful for the move that made me a Texan.
I ran the paper for over 10 years and we made tens of millions in profits. I was followed as publisher by Wes Turner, who still resides here and who loves to tell me the paper made even more money when he ran it.
McClatchy might be losing money – $38.9 million in the first quarter this year – but even today I am certain the Star-Telegram is profitable, just not profitable enough.
Both Turner and I know we had it easy. We laugh when we remember we thought our jobs were difficult. Those were the golden years of newspaper publishing and we could spend a lot on news. We were growing in leaps and bounds along with the city. The Star-Telegram was an outstanding, lively big-city newspaper.
When I arrived, we had 1,500 employees and the newsroom numbered 400 or so. In the fall of 1986 we opened the most modern printing facility in the world. Today, less than 200 folks work there. The paper is printed by the Dallas Morning News. The Star-Telegram rents office space downtown and the former home of Amon Carter’s pride and joy at 400 West 7th Street is an office building with a small museum to his legacy.
The paper’s latest round of staff cuts and organizational changes are detailed in a D magazine story that you can find on the magazine’s website (dmagazine.com)
I do not know the current publisher of the Star-Telegram but I know he has a tough job. I have met Jim Moroney, chairman, and chief executive officer of Belo, which owns the Dallas Morning News and reported a $4 million loss in the first quarter. Moroney is an earnest and smart man.
But the tides of change affecting the companies these men run crept up over the years with complacent media company management and then a tidal wave hit.
Craig’s List.
Much of the profit at newspapers 20 years ago was driven by classified advertising growth. The money flowing into newspapers for ads selling automobiles, renting apartments, looking for employees and even for selling puppies dropped almost directly to the bottom line.
“Craig” offered all of those advertising opportunities for free and the industry stared blankly at him and his dating site, hoping he would just fade away. He did not. The die was cast.
Opportunities were squandered.
The Star-Telegram had a version of email and an online newspaper, StarText, before anyone else in the industry. We did not know how to leverage it.
When I was there we started a Hispanic weekly, had a cable television listing company, and even a weekly business newspaper. Subsequent owners killed them all.
Many of the industry’s dilemmas fall squarely on bad, misguided management that crept up over decades. I used to joke that if I could make a living in the newspaper business it couldn’t be that difficult.
Over 25 years ago, a friend tagged along with me to a publishers convention.
“Never met so many unimpressive business people in my life,” he said.
And so here we are.
A favorite quote of mine is that “a city knows what it knows about itself from the daily newspaper.” Today, we all know less of what we need to know.
What’s next? No one really knows.
My belief is that print is not dead. Daily print is clearly dying. Weekly papers and papers publishing several days a week will survive. There is still strong Sunday newspaper readership.
The Business Press has had better times but we are rebuilding as fast as the money will allow. And we are growing. We’ll make money this year and are exploring alternatives for more publishing days.
Daily newspapers? Prayer might help.
Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net