Fitchburg Paper Deals With Turnover At The Top | Sentinel & Enterprise struggles to keep publisher seat filled
The publisher of a local newspaper typically fills a number of roles: leading editorial and sales staff, serving on community boards, acting as a punching bag for displeased readers and generally serving as the face of the paper.
At the Sentinel and Enterprise, the local paper serving Fitchburg, Leominster and the surrounding towns, over the past five years, that face has changed six times.
That level of turnover certainly raises eyebrows, but it may reflect some difficult conditions that are common to many daily newspapers as they struggle to turn a profit while moving into the online arena. No matter what the cause, leaders in the North County region say the lack of consistent leadership makes it hard for the paper to be as relevant as possible to the communities it serves.
Advertiser Reaction
Linda Racine, executive vice president at Fitchburg-based Rollstone Bank & Trust, said she’s been happy over the past few years to see the Sentinel’s leadership respond to the concerns of local businesspeople and political leaders when it comes to editorial content. But she said the turnover makes it difficult to build on the connections that have been created.
“The local community really tries to embrace anybody in that role, but they no sooner get to know what the community is all about than that person leaves,” she said.
Racine said that’s especially true because in most cases the new publishers have come from outside the local area.
“There’s really a learning curve, and there’s just a lot going on in these communities,” she said.
The most recent transition came in early May, when the Sentinel reported that Tom Kirk had resigned, effective immediately, after just over a year on the job. Kirk followed Sean McDonald, who went to the Sentinel after 10 years as an advertising director at newspapers in the state of Washington and lasted about five months before returning to Washington to work as a publisher of a group of local papers.
Before McDonald was Greig Smith, who was hired in January 2009. According to a report in the Sentinel at the time, he previously worked for Denver Newspaper Agency.
Prior to Smith, Rick Thurman held the post for most of 2008. He’s now working in sales and marketing at Mill River Capital in Florida. Before that was Chuck Owen, who spent about five months at the Sentinel before he went on to work in advertising with Gatehouse Media, which owns a number of local papers, including the MetroWest Daily News. Owen’s predecessor was Richard Barker, who held the position from March 2006 to early 2007.
The longest serving publisher of recent memory was Asa Cole, who held the position for six years.
Owen, who served as a division sales manager at The Boston Globe before joining the Sentinel in 2007, said that from the beginning he felt the job was not what he’d signed up for in the hiring process.
“I would rather have been told the idea that it was going to be very challenging: ‘It’s going to be tough, we’ve got cuts we’re making,’” he said.
Owen said it was a hard job for a number of reasons, including the industry-wide challenges in making a profit from journalism and the rough economy of North Central Massachusetts. But he said relations were also difficult with management at Media One New England, the division of MediaNews Group that oversees the Sentinel, the Lowell Sun and several weekly papers.
“There’s a lot expected out of very little support staff and things like that,” Owen said.
Corporate Issues
Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst with the Florida-based Poynter Institute, said MediaNews Group as a whole is generally considered to be having a difficult time. Based in Denver, it’s the second-largest media company in the country, but it filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and emerged six weeks later owned largely by its creditors.
MediaNews Group did not return calls for this story.
Edmonds said he’s not familiar with the Sentinel’s particular situation, but the high turnover rate could reflect difficulties related to the parent company or simple economic pressures on the paper itself.
Perhaps, he said, “new people get moved in and asked to turn it around, and for whatever reason they can’t.”
Like most newspapers, the Sentinel has seen a decline in circulation over the past decade. Its weekday numbers fell nearly 13 percent from 16,723 in 2000 to 14,593 in 2010. That’s better than the national average, which fell 22 percent from 2000 through 2009, the most recent year data was available from the Newspaper Association of America.
Thurman, who took the publisher position in March 2008, after Owen left, said it was hard to get a handle on the job. He said he found management shifted priorities rapidly, telling him to concentrate on meeting people in the community and then criticizing him for not devoting enough attention to generating revenue.
“You were walking in quicksand,” he said. “Your footing was never solid.”
Thurman said he found it particularly difficult working with his boss, Mark O’Neil, the president and publisher at MediaOne New England, and he believes the same is true of other Sentinel publishers.
“The common factor in all of that turnover is not the people that were turned over,” he said. “The common factor is the person we all reported to. It’s very simple.”
Another person close to the situation, who asked not to be named out of concern for possible repercussions in his career, also said that O'Neil had troubled relations with his direct reports including the publishers at the Sentinel.
O’Neil, who did not return calls for this story, joined MediaOne in 2005, the year before Cole ended his six-year stint with the Sentinel. According to a report in the Boston Business Journal at the time, he previously worked for the Boston Herald Newspaper Group and had already spent nearly 25 years in the New England newspaper industry.
In addition to his work in Lowell, O’Neil is serving as interim publisher at the Sentinel while the paper looks for a permanent replacement for Kirk.
Managing Expectations
As that search moves forward, two area executive search firms offered their advice on how to improve the hiring success rate. Charley Polachi, a partner with Polachi Access Executive Search in Framingham, said it’s crucial to have clear requirements for what a new hire would bring to the position, and a “first-year charter” that clearly lays out what the publisher would be expected to accomplish by their first anniversary.
Delores F. George, of DFG Executive Search in Worcester, agreed on the need for clear expectations. Having so many people cycle through a position creates an additional hurdle, but she said that’s not necessarily a fatal problem.
“Sometimes people want to take it as a challenge, too,” she said. “It’s a time to create, be creative and forge ahead.”
Meanwhile, many in the area the Sentinel serves are also eager for it to get a solid, consistent leader, especially since longtime editor Jeff McMenemy also recently left.
“It’s an important piece of the community,” said Fitchburg City Councilor Jody Joseph. “The paper can be more powerful, I think, if it had a consistent publisher that was involved in the community and that knew the community.”
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments