Local News: Quality Pays

John Costa delivering the Hovey Lecture in the garden of Wallace House.

Although he was once deputy managing editor of the St. Petersburg Times in central Florida, John Costa ’93 has found his calling in what may seem a surprising place for such an accomplished newsman: as editor-in-chief of The Bulletin of Bend, Oregon. And in the decade since he took the helm, Costa has seen the small paper do something most editors would give their eye teeth for — grow in frequency, size, readership and revenue. Costa shared his passion for community newspapers and the keys to growth in an unlikely era when he gave the 22nd annual Graham Hovey Lecture, entitled “Local News: Quality Pays” at Wallace House in September.

Costa, a Vietnam veteran, began his journalism career in 1969 after leaving the Army. By the time he became a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 1992, he was deputy managing editor of the St. Petersburg Times. The Fellowship gave Costa the focus to realize where his real passion lay — in the community journalism of small-town papers. Shortly thereafter, he left the Times after 20 years, and served four years as executive editor of the Idaho Statesman before moving on to Bend in 1997.

It’s no secret that the newspaper business has been in rapid decline of late and, during the Hovey Lecture, Costa maintained that it’s a small newspaper’s ability to focus on quality that allows The Bulletin to grow and prosper, bucking the trend of declining circulation and reduced advertising revenues. “Quality and profitability in newspapers should go hand-in-hand. I’m convinced that in the long run — and I emphasize the long run — profitability can’t be sustained without quality,” said Costa. He added that The Bulletin has not only increased circulation but has “outgrown the rapid population growth of the area and added market share, which in this business is called penetration.”

Costa credited the family-owned Western Communications, Inc. — which has owned The Bulletin for more than 50 years — with three key strategies that have ensured quality: investment, patience and a focus on the community. “The money is important,” he noted, “but how we use it is just as important.”

Costa said that Western has steadily invested in improvements at the paper, aiming to pass an enhanced company to the family’s next generation, rather than wringing out every cent of profit in the short term. Even with this long-term strategy, the newspaper group has remained profitable and increased circulation during the past several years. “The company’s gross worth is many times what it was 10 to 15 years ago, and its return to its shareholders is very strong, indeed — even after a decade of substantial investments,” Costa said.

According to Costa, quality also requires patience: “Patience is probably the most undervalued and unrewarded quality in America today.” Building a business over the long run requires a long-term commitment to employees and consistency in leadership. To wit, The Bulletin has had just four editors since 1910, and at ten years tenure, Costa has been there the shortest time.

Costa also observed that a reduction in newsroom staff, brought about by financial pressures for increased profits, usually reduces the amount of local news that a paper can cover. “Quality is the full complexion of a news story as it defines to meet the needs of the readership,” he said. The Bulletin covers national stories, but its focus remains on the local community.

The University community and beyond gather for the Hovey Lecture.

Many view the Internet as the biggest threat to the daily newspaper, sensing that the instant news gratification offered by online reporting is making printed news obsolete. Most newspapers around the country have Web pages, even if the content and design simply mirrors their print editions. Costa sees two camps in the newspaper-versus-Internet question: “One side argues that the best days for newspapers are over, and therefore there is little point in investing in the future of print. So, let’s rush to the Internet, as though there is clarity and certainty there,” he said. “The other side — including many of my fellow editors — refuses to believe that it is not 1955, and even given substantial resources, seem to want the role of curator rather than editor, digging in to defend all the operational virtues of the past, even when they are meaningless today.

Rather than trying to compete with the “instant news” format other newspapers are trying to achieve, The Bulletin does what local newspapers do best, Costa said. “We decided that we would break the grip of television and the Web on our front pages, which mostly affects national, foreign, and sports news. We offer eight to 12 pages of foreign and national news a day, but reality is several 24-hour news and sports channels, which leave traditional front pages looking stale and worn even before the foreman starts the press,” he explained. “Please don’t get me wrong. We also have a hard-hitting news report, a fine and respected editorial page, and a legacy of great project reporting. But we had those 10 years ago, and they weren’t enough to keep up with the market…The point is that we have the resources to offer information that no one else in our area can match, whether in print or on the Web.”

David Lampe, new University VP for Communications, welcomes Fellows and the audience to the annual Hovey Lecture.

Costa finished the Hovey Lecture by delivering something perhaps only a small town perspective can provide today’s larger newspaper community: hope. “As an industry, we seem to be racing forward when we really don’t know what the sustaining model of the future looks like,” he said. “We are scared and we’re grasping for concepts as we would life rings, except they are called ‘convergence,’ and ‘mobile journalism’ and ‘podcasting.’ We are not kidding ourselves about the threats to old-fashioned print readership, but we also believe that for the foreseeable future there will be a lot of print readers out there, and we want them all as we calculate new approaches for the future.”