Publisher from B.C. makes inroads into Seattle suburbs

Thirty years ago, David Black owned one small-town weekly newspaper in the interior of British Columbia. Today he controls an empire of more than 115 dailies, community papers and niche publications that stretch from Oahu to Ohio.

But the Victoria press baron maintains he's never had any grand plan.

"I don't know how it's happened, frankly," the soft-spoken Black told a radio interviewer in Akron, Ohio, after he bought that city's daily newspaper last summer. "I just kind of look at the opportunities as they come along."

Two months ago, Black saw opportunity in Seattle's suburbs.

His company, Black Press, bought the 10 King County Journal newspapers and touched off the biggest shakeup in the local newspaper scene since The Seattle Times switched from afternoon to morning publication nearly seven years ago.

Black decided to close the daily King County Journal, which had been losing money and circulation for years. Its final edition was published today.

Forty employees, mostly on the news side, are losing their jobs.

Bimonthly papers

The company also announced it would beef up the chain's seven free, bimonthly Reporter newspapers, start publishing six twice a week and one weekly, and begin delivering them by carrier instead of by mail.

This Wednesday, if all goes according to plan, the first issues of Black's revamped community papers will land on 220,000 suburban doorsteps from Kenmore to Auburn.

Black, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is known as a tenacious competitor. The day his company announced its King County plans, Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen predicted Black would court advertisers aggressively.

"You have a newspaper war coming," says one former Black publisher, who requested anonymity.

This isn't Black's first foray into Western Washington. His Sound Publishing subsidiary began buying community newspapers here in 1987, and now publishes 17 nondailies around the Puget Sound area, mostly on islands and the Kitsap Peninsula.

But he has kept a low profile, both in the region and the U.S. newspaper industry.

Those who have worked for Black and competed against him says he's low-key and personable.

Bob Dyer, a columnist with the Akron Beacon Journal, says Black disarmed staffers there by announcing his personal cellphone number the first time he addressed them as the paper's new owner.

But he also knows how to play hardball. "If he wants something, he knows how to get it," says David Beers, editor-in-chief of an online newspaper that covers British Columbia, where most of Black's holdings still are concentrated.

Vancouver native

Black, 60, is a Vancouver native who broke into newspapers as a business analyst at the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily. Itching to be his own boss, he bought the tiny Williams Lake (B.C.) Tribune in 1975.

It cost $60,000, Black said in the Akron radio interview, and the bank insisted his father co-sign on the loan.

He slowly added more nondaily community papers in the interior of B.C., then expanded to Vancouver Island, Puget Sound, and Vancouver and its suburbs.

For the most part he bought existing papers, but he also started some in communities that already had competing dailies or weeklies. He consolidated printing operations and kept his presses humming with commercial jobs.

His wife, Anne Elizabeth, who died last year, was deeply involved in the company's growth.

First daily acquired

Black Press didn't acquire its first daily until 1998. Community papers remain the company's backbone. They are the models for what the Reporter papers will become, says Don Kendall, a 19-year Black Press veteran who heads the company's new King County operations.

Most publish between once and three times a week. Most are tabloids. Most are free.

All are intensely local. Readers can get world, national and regional news from many sources, Kendall says, "but where are they going to find out what's going on in their backyard?"

Black's community papers deliver meat-and-potatoes hometown news, sports and features. If you want to know what's going on in a suburban city hall on Vancouver Island, one veteran observer of the B.C. newspaper scene says, you read the local Black paper, not the Victoria daily.

"We really know our communities," says Judy Reimche, editor of the Black-owned Peninsula News Review, a biweekly on the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria. But she also says the three-person news staff works long hours for little money — not uncommon at community newspapers.

While Black's papers operate with bare-bones news staffs, they win their share of awards. His Puget Sound publications picked up more than 40 in the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association's annual contest last year. But they aren't known for ambitious, groundbreaking journalism.

"They're not bad papers, but for the most part they're not exciting papers either," Beers, the online editor, says of Black's Vancouver community papers. "They're more about making money than breaking big stories."

Wealthy venture

Community newspapers have made Black wealthy, and helped make him a player in B.C.'s civic and political life.

He lives in what some consider Victoria's grandest seaside estate. He chaired the committee that brought the Commonwealth Games — a mini-Olympics for former British possessions — to the city in 1994. He heads a panel of business and academic leaders, appointed by the premier, who monitor B.C.'s economic health and advises the provincial government.

But Reimche and others who have worked for him say Black doesn't interfere with news coverage.

By all indications, he remains a firm believer in the future of print. Last year, while many in the industry were wringing their hands over its imminent extinction, Black went on a buying binge.

In addition to the King County Journal Newspapers, acquired for an undisclosed sum, he bought the widely distributed Lynnwood-based Little Nickel shoppers in Western Washington and Oregon for about $27.5 million.

He paid $165 million for the 119,000-circulation Akron Beacon Journal, which, while profitable, was considered one of the more troubled papers in the stable of its former owner, Knight Ridder. With a private-equity partner, Black also submitted unsuccessful bids for Philadelphia's two ailing dailies.

"I think there's just been some great opportunities — there are more newspapers available in the U.S. than ever before," Kendall says. "The company's never stood still."

Unafraid of risk

Black has demonstrated a willingness to take business risks others won't. "He's willing to go outside the box, to not follow the beaten path," says David Lord, a sometime Black competitor who heads Seattle-based Pioneer Newspapers, a chain of Northwest weeklies and small dailies.

In B.C. and Kitsap County, for instance, Black has experimented with free dailies — quick roundups of world news, distributed at ferry terminals, coffee shops and other retail outlets — as adjuncts to his community papers.

Perhaps his biggest leap came in 2001 when he bought the 60,000-circulation Honolulu Star-Bulletin, a daily that was all but dead (see accompanying story).

It isn't making money yet, by all accounts. Wayne Cahill, who heads the union that represents the paper's news employees, says the news staff is smaller and is making less.

But the Star-Bulletin continues to hold its own with the larger Honolulu Advertiser in journalism-awards competitions. And Cahill says Black has shown no signs of giving up.

Cuts quickly made

At the Akron Beacon Journal, Black cut the news staff by 25 percent weeks after buying the paper. He didn't make any friends in journalism when he told Reuters that body count didn't correlate with quality, and that he'd seen too many people in newsrooms talking or looking at the Internet.

Dyer, the Beacon Journal columnist, says losing so many colleagues has been troubling. But he also says he senses Black at least has a game plan: "I didn't always feel that way with Knight Ridder."

Managers in Akron, Dyer says, are discussing moving into weeklies, offering free classified ads, even giving the paper away.

"They say everything's on the table," he says.

In King County, Kendall says each Reporter paper eventually will have an office in the town it serves; in the past, news and sales people worked out of Bellevue or Kent. He says the papers will get involved in local Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce.

"One of the keys to community newspapers is becoming part of the landscape," he says.

The papers will run lean. Kendall says the company has doubled the total news staff by hiring just 11 more full-time employees.

Former King County Journal reporters who interviewed for reporting jobs say they were offered $15 an hour, less than they were making before.

Going after ads

Some industry observers say Black will court mom-and-pop advertisers who can't afford the Seattle dailies.

Others say the Reporters will go after insert advertising from big retailers, challenging The Times and Post-Intelligencer.

"I think he's going to go after it all," says Denis Law, who founded the Reporter chain and owned it until 2000.

But Black faces a big challenge in creating a reliable carrier network from scratch, he adds.

Times spokeswoman Jill Mackie, whose company also handles advertising and circulation for the P-I, wouldn't discuss what the daily papers are planning in response to Black.

But Kendall says The Times has hired a consultant to advise it.

And, according to a Jan. 3 internal memo, the Times planned to collect the addresses of King County Journal subscribers this month so it could deliver free sample copies of the Times and P-I to them, starting tomorrow.

Times reporters and editors have been asked to focus more attention on the eastern and southern suburbs in coming months.

While offering no details, P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby says his newsroom, too, is discussing possible responses to Black.

The Canadian is stirring things up.

"I think he's making the right kinds of moves," Law says. "Even in a metropolitan market like this, there's still a market for local news."

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