Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Interesting couple of days in Pittsburgh, where I went to attend a conference of newspaper people. This particular gathering was for folks involved in family-owned newspaper companies, a thinning herd if ever there was one.
Many of the folks who would’ve attended a gathering like this have sold out, including those who owned the newspaper in Junction City, Lawrence, Topeka, Salina, and – if you go back further – Wichita and Kansas City. Those who remain are doing good work, but they’re talking mostly now about scrambling to eke out a profit so as to continue to serve the community. Side note: If you can’t make a profit, you can’t serve the public. Non-profits are inevitably beholden to somebody; the only sustainable model for the future of independent professional journalism is for subscribers to pay for that journalism and for a private business to run it.
The most successful path for a newspaper family nowadays is to diversity into other businesses – the Nutting family, for instance. They played host in Pittsburgh because they own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Good gig if you can get it. They also went for some time into the ski resort business and into natural gas.
Business-wise, it would’ve been smart for us to do the same thing decades ago. We didn’t, for reasons that are particular to our family dynamics and the way my forbearers set up the companies as basically independent of one another. Smart decision in many ways, particularly when newspapers were highly profitable. That stopped being the case about a decade ago, and so the decision looks less good now, particularly as you look at it from the owners’ box on a pleasant summer evening.
The Nuttings, I might add, own the company that now owns the the Lawrence Journal-World. So they’re still in newspapers.
My grandfather turned down the chance to get into cable TV; he thought it was unseemly for one company to own too much of the media business in one community. The previous family owners in Lawrence, meanwhile, got into cable and eventually sold that business for tens of millions of dollars.
The fact that we didn’t go that way – we didn’t go big – also meant we were never saddled with big debt, and it meant we put our energy into more public-minded matters. Dad started the YES! Fund, which has now raised millions for after-school programs for kids here. He chaired the Pulitzer Prize board, and he led the fight for press freedom in the Western Hemisphere.
Some of you might know that my oldest son started a business in the back of the Mercury building that has now attracted a bunch of venture-capital funding for a newspaper-affiliated enterprise. So while I fret about what direction to go with our family business, and how to position the newspaper to sustain itself and its public-service mission, and how to attract the next generation to get involved, the reality is that he’s already out there doing it. On his own; the family business is just a fractional owner. The reality is that there’s going to have to be much more of that, but the model is right there in front of us.
Which, ironically, was pointed out to me by none other than Bob Nutting. Sitting in his own building, as his baseball team hit the field .
