Scotch pines and newspapers

By Mike VanBuren
From the late January 2014 edition of The North Woods Call

     The scotch pines on the hillsides surrounding my home have been dying, rotting and toppling to earth for several years now.
     I guess that’s part of their life cycle.  They reach a certain age, then surrender to time, weather, insects and woodpeckers.
     Eventually, they fall—mostly into the woods, but sometimes across the yard and driveway.  That’s when I am called to practice some not-so-delicate surgery with my chain saw.
     We lost a few more of them during a wet and windy day last November.  One tree blocked the drive and was quickly removed—with large, heavy sections of the trunk dragged to the side—while three or four others now lean precariously against their neighbors  alongside our endangered barn.
     I’ve been threatening for years to cut them all out before one or more crashes into the vulnerable structure, but I always seem to find reasons not to do it.  Next spring it will have to become a priority job.
  I’m beginning to wonder if newspapers have a similar life cycle, thriving for a set number of years before dying and returning to the dust from which they came.
     The North Woods Call, for example, has a rich and vibrant history, and is now in its 61st year of publication.  With the right combination of resources and marketing, it would seem that the newspaper could remain a solid niche publication for many more years.
   Yet, for decades The Call has been slowly hemorrhaging subscribers and advertisers to the point where the business is nearly as unstable as the old scotch pines leaning over our barn.
     I’m not really sure how healthy  the ledgers were during Marguerite Gahagan’s 16-year tenure as publisher, though I suspect she had her economic challenges.
     I do know, however, that during the storied Glen Sheppard years, the subscriber base had declined by at least 77 percent from its one-time high to where it was when I first started talking to Shep back in the 1990s about taking over the publication.  And by the time of his death in early 2011, there had been an additional 27 percent drop in those figures.
     Makes you wonder why anyone would want to try to resurrect the publication after Shep was gone, doesn’t it?
     Call it a labor of love, or just plain craziness, but that’s exactly what we did—only to discover that less than 20 percent of Shep’s remaining subscribers cared to stay with the publication under new ownership and a much-needed price increase.
     We know some of them were already disgruntled before we even decided to reopen the newspaper,  because they had not been refunded their unused subscription money when Shep died.  Mary Lou Sheppard, of course, closed the operation and said she  didn’t have the cash reserves to give back all the money.  (Don’t worry, that won’t happen again on our watch).
   Thankfully, enough of The Call’s most loyal subscribers signed up—for either print or electronic editions—to pay the bills and allow us to continue publishing for the past 17 months.
     We’re still at it, of course, but examining the numbers gives us pause.  Although many of our own subscribers have renewed their commitments in the past few months—with a good number opting to turn their one-year subscriptions into two years—a significant number are apparently exercising their freedom of choice by dropping out of The Call community altogether.
     There are probably as many reasons for this as there are former subscribers.  Some, unfortunately, have passed away.  Others have aged to the point where their faltering eyesight no longer allows them to read.  Some may have decided that they couldn’t afford a subscription this year, while others may simply feel that The Call is not meeting their needs.
     We can’t know all the possible motivations—except in those handful of cases where folks have written to tell us such things—but this trend seems to follow the long-term trajectory of The Call and of newspapers in general.
     Many once-profitable newspapers and magazines have gone belly up in recent years, while others have been forced to cut back on business expenses, reduce their publication schedules, or convert to exclusively electronic editions.
     We don’t know yet what all this means for The Call.  We still think the publication meets a vital need and—with the right combination of resources and marketing expertise—could attract a new generation of readers and advertisers.
     But time will tell.
     Like the scotch pines hanging precariously over the VanBuren barn, we’d like to somehow prevent these financial doldrums from crashing down on us and wiping out the business structure.
     If we can just get our marketing chain saw running, maybe we can buzz these troubles away.