Summer 2011 California Publisher
PUBLISHER PROFILE
Richard Esposito Mountain Democrat, Placerville What sparked your interest in newspapers as a career? My uncle was the classified sales manager at the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald American. “The real money is in advertising,” he told me. When a retail sales position became available at my hometown newspaper in Herkimer, N.Y., I applied and was offered the job. How did your career take you to Placerville? While I was publishing The Oak Ridger, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., a newspaper recruiter contacted me. He was seeking a prospective replacement for Mountain Democrat Publisher Jim Webb, who was planning to retire. My wife and I had a yearning to return to California. Prior to relocating to Tennessee we spent five years in Nevada City where I was the associate publisher at The Union in Grass Valley. So with one daughter attending the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and another getting ready to start her first year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, we decided the time was right. You could say that instead of sending our kids off to school, we left. What’s the most important thing you learned along the way that prepared you to be a publisher? I’ve been at this for over 30 years. In 1985 I was named Thomson Newspapers’ youngest newspaper publisher at Sikeston, Mo., at age 27. For five years before that I was a regional marketing consultant working in Thomson’s corporate headquarters in Des Plaines, Ill. During that time I had an opportunity to work closely with more than 24 different newspaper properties and their respective publishers. My territory ranged from the upper Midwest to California. This job exposed me to a broad range of management styles and experiences. Most importantly I learned how to value our greatest resource: the talented people working for us. Building solid teams with the proper chemistry to achieve a newspaper’s objectives is one of the keys for success. What advice would you give someone interested in a similar career path? This industry is challenging and everevolving. For those considering this career path I suggest a wider scope of study. New technology and shifting demographics are altering our business model, so it’s important to understand the impact of that technology and how it affects readers of tomorrow. Keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to foster change. Let’s face it, we’re a mature industry and audience demands are changing. We need to continually reinvent ourselves. My advice: Be adaptable. What excites you about this business? Everyone in this business knows just how truly unique it is. Each day brings new challenges to overcome. It’s exciting to know newspapers still make a difference in the communities they serve. And small town newspapers like The Mountain Democrat have an impact. One day we’re covering a national story like the Jaycee Lee Dugard trial; the next day we’re launching a new special section. What other industry offers so much variety? You oversee more than The Mountain Democrat. Tell us about your other newspapers and your affiliated companies. Besides The Mountain Democrat, I’m responsible for Village Life, a free weekly community newspaper with a distribution of 10,000 serving El Dorado Hills on the west end of our county. We also publish Cameron Park Life, an 8,000 cir-
Placerville Publisher Richard Esposito, right, with staff members Dean Royal, left, Joe Boydston and, seated, David Martinelli: “Our newsroom experienced a radical paradigm shift as we changed our focus from ‘fiber’ to ‘cyber’ and embraced the future of our industry.” culation free monthly newspaper serving the communities of Cameron Park and Shingle Springs. Additionally I publish the Georgetown Gazette, an 1,800-circulation paid weekly newspaper serving Georgetown and the communities on the “Divide.” In addition to these news publications, we print and direct mail a totalmarket publication called the “Extra” to 30,000 homes in El Dorado County. Besides our newspaper products we publish a biannual tourism publication with plans under way to launch a new regional Sierra foothills magazine. Our website, mtdemocrat.com, was revised last October and we restructured our news department to reverse publish. We’re proud to say we were the first newspaper in California to accomplish this. This change in strategy allows our paid newspaper subscribers’ free access to all online content before we publish the print edition. We’re currently rolling out a new paywall to better capitalize on this. How do you serve your varied demographics? The Mountain Democrat reader demographic is older, similar to other newspapers. However, we enjoy tremendous brand loyalty. As California’s oldest newspaper (celebrating 160 years this June) we are part of the original fabric in our state’s history. Our online edition complements the print edition very well. Like our print edition, all content is local. We don’t subscribe to any wire services, so all our news resources are targeted to local coverage. Tourists and locals alike read our publications for all things local, including the many entertaining and recreational activities our area offers. Tell us a little more about your digital innovations. Inland Press Association recently awarded us Second Place in the category of General Excellence in Online News Service for newspapers with a circulation of less than 200,000. We were honored and thrilled to receive this recognition given the number of newspapers in this category across the country. When we revamped our website last October, our goal was to make it more reader friendly and functional. Our newsroom experienced a radical paradigm shift as we changed our focus from “fiber” to “cyber” and embraced the future of our industry. Joe Boydston, vice president of Digital; and Dean Royal, director of Online Strategies, were instrumental in the
development and launch. We’re using WordPress blogging technology that Joe refined. I like to refer to it as “Wordpress on steroids.” Everything we cover appears on our website first. We then reverse publish back to the print edition. Our paywall was temporarily removed during the project and we of course experienced a huge leap in traffic. Today we’re reinstalling the wall and testing a new pay model. Our online pay strategy includes charging a fee for content within our market area but allowing readers outside our DMA free access. We’re also developing a new advertising model we believe advertisers will really appreciate. How has your changed workflow made it easier on staff? How has it helped revenue-wise? Reverse publishing has accomplished a number of positive outcomes. First, we increased newsroom productivity. Sports reporters, for example, now upload stories and photos directly online immediately following an event. Staff and editors can write and publish content from home or anywhere with Internet access. Photos can be uploaded directly to the site using nearly any Internet-connected device. We’re generating more local content online than ever. The inclusion of a user-friendly reader submission form also helps drive more people and local content
PERSONAL STATS Name: Richard B. Esposito Born: New York, N.Y., 1958 First job: Advertising sales representative, The Evening Telegram, Herkimer, N.Y. Current job: Publisher of The Mountain Democrat in Placerville. Family: Wife Janie (married 23 years) and daughters Madelyn and Chelsea Education: B.S. in Business Management Community involvement: El Dorado County Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, El Dorado County Snowline Hospice Board of Directors, Placerville Rotary Club
to our site. It gives our readers immediate access (with editors’ approval). Second, we reduced the bottleneck of page production because content is readily attainable on deadline. Updates and edits to stories are already made to the published stories on our website, so by the print deadline articles are ready to move over into our print edition. This allows us more time to get ahead of building pages. Third, we no longer rely on an editorial database system. No more repairs, expensive software upgrades or reliance on others to manage content storage. Lastly, when we roll out our new advertising product, clients will see their ads online immediately, thus getting advance exposure of their advertising message before it appears in the print edition.
What should smaller newspapers do: innovate or wait for a product they can buy out of the box? Smaller newspapers are in an ideal situation. Although we may lack deep pockets, we don’t have the constraints larger newspapers face. Our news coverage is all local all the time so our mission is easy to understand. We’re nimble enough to innovate and experiment. Innovation is the key, though. We must try new ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. Fortunately we’ve been blessed with outstanding talent to lead the charge and owners who understand and support innovation. If you have the resources to innovate then go for it. Our Wordpress model is open source, so everyone has access to it. But innovation doesn’t necessarily mean spending tons of money on technology. For example, we realigned our organizational chart and named our Production manager, David Martinelli, online editor. David coordinates website content and works tirelessly to improve its functionality while acting as the conduit between the news and production departments. Your companies are part of McNaughton Newspapers. How have your innovations benefited the group? The Mountain Democrat was the beta site for our recently developed Wordpress technology. Our tri-weekly print cycle was ideal for the transition. Our sister newspaper, The Davis Enterprise, started reverse publishing in February, and the staff at The Daily Republic at Fairfield was to make the transition in mid-May. We’re now testing a new paywall concept that will eventually be used at our sister newspapers. And when we roll out our new electronic advertising program, we’ll likely launch it here first. Being small makes it easier to test, adjust and reinvent. It’s not that our sister newspapers can’t accomplish these new innovations. Our size and publishing cycle make us better positioned to try new concepts. Conversely, name a couple of benefits that sprout in Fairfield or Davis and then find their way up the hill. We recently consolidated our packaging departments at Fairfield. As we explored ways to reduce expenses and become more efficient we realized performing this function at our print site at Fairfield made better sense. We’re looking into centralizing See ESPOSITO Page 10