Everybody knows newspapers are dead.
Conventional wisdom says if the paper newspaper isn’t dead yet, it will be a goner soon, lying supine in the ultimate newspaper morgue.
Who would deny it?
Why, it’s well-known that newspaper circulation is down, down, down.
Being driven there by the Web, right?
Ad revenues are history, too. Gobbled up by google, yahoo, craigslist, eBay and sundry other websites.
Anybody who’d START a newspaper, a PAPER newspaper, in these times, why, that knothead should check into the nearest regional psychiatric institution, not so?
Shhh!
Don’t tell Greg Rokicak.
Greg, whose last name is pronounced ROCK-a-check and whose nickname in his hometown of Gibraltar is “Rocky,” has some news for purveyors of conventional wisdom. Their paths need not be strewn with rocks.
Seven years ago, Greg started publishing a newspaper. A PAPER newspaper. It’s called the Downriver Review. And doggoned if he isn’t making money.
Not lots of money.
But enough to support himself.
The Downriver Review is a one-man operation. Well, not quite. He gets a lot of help from his pal, Brad Swoveland. Brad designed Greg’s website and helps him with accounting. Otherwise, the Review is Greg’s baby. And the website is not exaclty up to date. Paper is Greg’s medium of choice.
He shoots the photos, recruits local writers and photographers, sells the ads, lays out the paper and picks it up from the printer. He trucks it from his home in Sturgis to Downriver communities like…
Wait a minute. Did I just type “Sturgis”?
Where the bing bong is Sturgis? WHAT is Sturgis?
Sturgis, friends, is a town of about 11,000 people so close to the state line that a loud belch can be heard in Indiana.
Why, in Sturgis, when the wind blows hard from the north, the trees don’t murmur, they drawl like a Hoosier.
In Sturgis, they’re so close to Hoosierland the cops once arrested a carload of drunken Notre Dame fans for violating the Interstate Anti-Riot Act.
If you break wind in Sturgis, — okay, you get the idea. It ain’t exactly Downriver. In fact, it’s so far from Downriver, Greg has to drive his twice-monthly press-run of 3,000 Downriver Reviews 150 miles from the Sturgis Journal printing plant to the nearest outpost that could reasonably be termed Downriver.
But back to my main point — he’s running a PRINT newspaper! What kind of chuckleheaded thing is that to do?
Didn’t he get the memo?
The one that said newspapers, the PAPER papers, are headed the way of the dodo, the mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger, Cro-Magnon man and every other extinct breed of livestock you can think of.
Wait a minute, though. Who wrote that memo?
Hmmm. Let’s see, I get most of my news about newspapers from, golly gosh, from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News or newspaper surrogates like Columbia Journalism Review.
If you’re betting on horses, which tout do you believe?
In the case of newspapers and their supposedly imminent demise, the tout is the industry, which echoes the same glum news day after day.
I won’t belabor the numbers here, but refer new readers to my first essay on The Future of Newspapers elsewhere in this blog. I make the point that the very numbers pundits rely on to make their sad prognostications come of necessity from the newspapers. The grimmest are the circulation numbers. If you believe the numbers for the Detroit Free Press, for instance, the paper lost roughly half its readers between 1981 and 2007.
Two things about those numbers: First, through a poorly-conceived merger in 1989, the News and Free Press lost — by design — huge numbers or readers. Self-inflicted injury. Then in 1995, the papers provoked a strike that cost them thousands and thousands more subscribers, many of whom were permanently alienated in this pro-union town. Can’t blame the Web for either of those numbskull moves.
Second, there’s a saying in the newspaper business, so Greg tells me: “Newspaper people lie about their circulation and brag about their drinking.”
I’m suspicious of the circulation numbers, especially ones from the 1970s and 1980s when the Detroit papers were first at “war” with each other, vying for top place and possibly fudging their numbers and later claiming to the Justice Department that the Free Press was “failing” and in a “downward spiral.” Lots of motivation for telling a few stretchers.
Greg doesn’t need to lie about his circulation. He prints 3,000 papers, carts them to Wayne County and sets them up — freebies — in bars, restaurants, stores, anywhere the owners will let him give away his Downriver Review. From Rockwood to Allen Park and points between.
He doesn’t sell the paper. It’s a giveaway, because all his income comes from selling ads.
In these days of gloomy economics, it’s a tough sell. His main competition comes from the Heritage newspaper chain. For all their complaining about poor ad revenues, the Detroit papers don’t seem to be trying hard for ads in Wayne County, especially the southern reaches of the county, Greg told me.
Why am I dwelling on this mite of a paper, 3,000 freebies, an upstart? Because I haven’t read anything like this in the mainline papers. They’re all moping about how the Internet’s killing them. Baloney. They’re doing it to themselves. And here’s this guy with virtually no capital, just working away to make a living and incidentally showing us that there is a future for newspapers.
PAPER newspapers.
His paper is not big on what we journalists call, well, journalism. Greg doesn’t like to write. He calls his approach to writing “a phobia.” He runs government and political press releases verbatim. He recruits local writers to send columns. He doesn’t pay writers, though he gives them free ads. For instance, Kathy Covert, an Ecorse native and Grand Valley State University history prof, writes a weekly column on Downriver history that Greg runs along with an ad for her book on Ecorse history. I know the ad sparked one sale, because I ordered her book from it.
Greg is 54. He grew up with newspapers. His dad, August Rokicak, the real “Rocky” in the family, owned a weekly called “Pulse” when Greg was growing up. Pulse covered Gibraltar, and Greg used to shoot photos for his dad. He grew to love photography and all other aspects of newspapering — except writing.
For this column, I asked Greg to answer a set of questions that I emailed to him. After several days, I hadn’t received them. I called him to ask if he could send me his answers. Well, he said, how about you interview me? Writing the answers would take forever, because he’d get hung up on making sure his grammar was correct.
Greg’s first love is music. He plays guitar and keyboard and has warmed up audiences for Ted Nugent. Now he plays for the Kalamazoo Civic Theater and other venues. When he was young, it was all about music. That was to be his career. He slid into newspaper work because he knew the business. For years, he worked for a Sturgis shopper doing art and ads. The shopper was sold a couple times and one day, his boss invited him to go for a walk. When Greg came back, his co-workers watched him clean out his desk.
It had been a good life. He had a $50,000-a-year salary and a 27-foot sailboat he docked in St. Joseph. The salary was gone. There was never a pension. After he started the Downriver Review, Greg motored Jam 3, his sailboat, around the Lower Peninsula. It’s sitting on a rack in a Gibraltar marina now. Income from the newspaper hasn’t hit a level where he can afford the cost of docking the boat.
In the years before I took a buyout from the Free Press, I thought about starting a newspaper. But I’m quite different from Greg. I am a journalist, a writer, and I’m jealous of my time. The idea of hauling newspapers around town, cold-calling businesses to try and sell ads, the layout and all the production — hey, that’s not my cup of chamomile. When I considered the idea at all, I thought strictly in terms of a web publication. Hence this blog, joelontheroad.com
I have so far to sell a single ad for my blog. But I haven’t tried, either. I’ve been wrapped up in writing.
But come to think of it, I do have an ad FOR my blog. It’s in the Downriver Review. Greg is running an ad for my site in return for using my columns in his paper.
Greg is syndicating joelontheroad.com!
I’m hoping the ad and publication of my columns in Greg’s paper will let my old Downriver readers know I’m still alive, still working and still interested in them.
I like what Greg is doing and I’m glad to help keep his paper afloat.
What really is keeping it going, though, is a lot of hard work and long hours by a guy with a 300-mile two-way commute.
Since my idea of starting a paper is concentrated on the Web, I wondered why Greg thought of putting out a PAPER paper in the first place.
I called Greg and said, “Common wisdom says print newspapers are dying. What do you think?”
“I’m just right now when you called I had a stack of about three or four Metro Times and Real Detroit and I’m sitting at my kitchen table leafing through every one of them and pulling things I like and recycling the rest. Look how good the Metro Times is doing. Seventy or eighty pages, a lot of advertising I probably wouldn’t accept, but nevertheless, you’ve got Jack Lessenberry and the first half a dozen pages are pretty good articles, and they’re making money. And like me, they’re news stand delivery. I don’t think they’re going away. People sit there in coffee shops with their laptops and computers, but let’s face it, a newspaper article I want to read later, I just rip it out of the paper and set it up where I’m going to read it.
“What’s the difference between you and the big papers?” I asked him.
“At the Heritage, they keep trying new things, and if it doesn’t work, they kill it and try something else based on the latest expert that comes in and tells them what they should do.”
“I don’t run my paper with experts. Every week I choose what news should go in. What is there to do with a newspaper? You put articles in it, you try to make it look nice, you try to make sure you’ve got as much profit to support your product.”
“What do you think is the Future of Newspapers?”
“How to connect the newspaper with the Internet,” Greg said. “I’m looking for some ideas.”
“What’s your ultimate goal with Downriver Review?”
“We want to start adding pages and we want to go to color. We’d like to have a better writer, I’d like to make it more controversial. I just don’t know how to do it.”
“Is the Downriver Review making money?”
“I’ve been supporting myself for a number of years. Yes we are, or I’d be out of business.”
“How can you make money when the dailies supposedly are having trouble? (Note that they still make money, just not as much as their owners want.)
“Well, when I was working… for the corporations, … the company was a million-dollar-a-year company and over a year, the corporation got about $400,000 in profit. They called that cash sweet. After everything was paid and your bonus was set up on how much profit you get, the more people you fire, obviously, the more money you’re going to make. The corporations are fine. It’s all about cutting the payroll. The corporations are making plenty of money. It’s always said their profit margins are more than many other companies. They’re greedy.”
“They figure they can melt the papers down. They don’t care about circulation rates going down, because half the time they lie about it. Newspapers lie about their circulation and brag about their drinking.”
“They’re gonna be okay. What will happen is when the corporations melt them down to nothing, someone will buy them.”
“Will there always be a place for paper newspapers?” I asked.
“There will always be a place for newspapers because it’s an easy-to-move-around vehicle. I went through 10, 15, 20 papers this afternoon. I read that a local realtor died and I didn’t know it. He got an obituary. I’m going to my daughter’s house, and I pulled it out to read. Just news you wouldn’t happen on that you’re not looking for. I’m sure on the Internet you can run into stuff, but … in the short years I’ve been doing this, people call me up and ask me questions about things that really I wouldn’t think of. People look to a newspaper to be their advocate, and I think that’s great. When people call me and ask me something I’m absolutely not qualified to answer, I tell them that, but I always take their call.
“So there will always be newspapers. Even 20 years before, when I had not even started talking about starting a newspaper, people were saying newspapers were dead. Back when television came in, they said that. People said people don’t write any more, they talk on the telephone. They say young people aren’t writing. We still have young people writing. They may mis-spell words, but they’re still writing. Yes. I don’t think they’re going away, because they’re so portable. Newspapers are like books. People that like to read books, you drive yourself crazy trying to read a book on the computer. A book is just a friendly vehicle. As Forest Gump said, ‘That’s all I got to say about that.’ ”
Greg tells me things are looking bright enough at his paper that he’s planning on putting Jam 3 in the water this spring.
Joelontheroad.com plans to cover the event.
Contact me at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com
