Future of sold Journal uncertain

The King County Journal's new owner says it will decide in the next few weeks whether to close the struggling suburban daily.

"We want to take one more look and see if there's a way to save the paper," Don Kendall, vice president of Sound Publishing, said Monday.

Kendall also said his company, a subsidiary of Black Press of Victoria, B.C., sees "virtually unlimited potential" in seven local non-daily sister publications of the Journal, and plans to expand them next year.

Black Press is buying all 10 papers in the King County Journal Newspapers group: the daily Journal; two weeklies, the Mercer Island Reporter and Snoqualmie Valley Record; and seven papers published twice monthly and distributed by mail: the Auburn Reporter, Bellevue Reporter, Bothell/Kenmore Reporter, Covington/Maple Valley Reporter, Kent Reporter, Redmond Reporter and Renton Reporter.

Horvitz Newspapers, the outgoing owner, announced the deal Wednesday. Neither party has disclosed the price.

Kendall said Black bought the chain to get the seven Reporter papers, not the Journal. After Horvitz put the papers on the market this summer, "anyone except us who took a look at this group looked at the daily and stopped looking," he said.

"It's no secret the problems the King County Journal has had."

When Horvitz put the papers up for sale, the company revealed that, while nine were profitable, the daily had been losing money for eight years. The paper's weekday circulation is about 39,000, down substantially from the 67,000 its two predecessor papers claimed in 1993.

Kendall and Jim Tighe, another Black Press executive, met with Journal employees Monday in Kent and Bellevue. "We made no promises," Kendall said.

He said a decision on the paper's fate would come within "weeks, not months."

Employees who attended the sessions and spoke only on condition of anonymity said Kendall's announcement didn't come as a surprise. "There's kind of a wait-and-see attitude now," said one.

"What's going to happen is going to happen," said another, who described the prevailing attitude among the staff as "resignation."

Kendall said in an interview that Black plans to start publishing the Reporter papers every week starting in January, then increasing publication to twice a week later in the year.

He said the papers, which now operate from King County Journal buildings in Bellevue and Kent, would move into offices in the cities they serve, "so they become true community newspapers."

Staffs will be beefed up, he said, and some additions could come from the King County Journal if the daily closes.

The Mercer Island and Snoqualmie Valley weeklies will be "really unaffected" by the change in ownership, Kendall said.

Black Press has made a splash in U.S. newspaper circles in recent years with its purchase of two metropolitan dailies — the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal — but community newspapers are its backbone.

In British Columbia, it owns about 75 papers that publish from one to three times a week.

Through its Sound Publishing subsidiary, based on Bainbridge Island, Black publishes 17 community newspapers in Western Washington, mostly on the Kitsap Peninsula and islands in Puget Sound.

Black also owns Little Nickel Classifieds of Lynnwood, which it acquired in September.

The company publishes free tabloid dailies in several British Columbia cities and on the Kitsap Peninsula. They are thin publications, aimed at commuters and available only on news racks or at retail establishments. Their content is mostly short national and international stories interspersed with local advertising.

It might make sense for Black to transform the King County Journal into such a publication, said Nick Russell, a retired University of Regina journalism professor who lives on Vancouver Island. "That's the trend all across North America, the free daily," he said.

Kendall said Black has no plans now to start a free daily in the Seattle area.

Still, a former Black newspaper publisher, who requested anonymity, said Seattle is ripe for a free daily and Black is in a good position to start one.

With the addition of the King County Journal's relatively new press in Kent, "they've now got four presses within two hours of Seattle up and down I-5," the former publisher said. "That's a lot of iron. And Seattle's enough of a commuter town."

Free dailies in the San Francisco Bay area, with more local news than Black's free dailies, might serve as a better model, he added.

Under Black, the 10 King County Journal newspapers will be known as King County Publications, with Kendall as their general manager. He is a former Honolulu Star-Bulletin publisher.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com