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Ron Vodenichar, General Manager, Eagle Printing Company

Ron Vodenichar is General Manager of the Eagle Printing Company in Butler County, PA. He oversees a 30,000 circulation daily, a Sunday and four weeklies plus a large commercial printing operation. We spoke to Ron in December about his 25+ years in newspaper publishing and what he sees for the future.

How did you get started in the newspaper publishing business?
I went into the newspaper business direct- ly out of college back in 1977. My first job was with the Steubenville Herald Star, which was part of the Thomson chain. I started as a District Sales Manager and then held various circulation management positions. When they opened a new cor- porate office in Kansas City I became the circulation consultant for 22 newspapers from Kansas City to the West Coast. I was in charge of circulation policy, recruitment of circulation managers for the papers, and working with the individual publishers and general managers at those properties on their circulation issues. I left Thomson in 1989 as they were starting to break up and came here to the Eagle Printing Company in Butler in late 1989. It is a family owned operation, bought by the Wise family in 1903, so we have actually celebrated our 100th anniversary of their ownership while I've been here.

Can you tell us about your market?
We're 30 miles directly north of Pittsburgh, and that makes us your classic bedroom community. Our county is the least expen- sive in the area as far as the county taxes go. It's much less expensive than Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, so we benefit from a lot of migration. But we also end up with Pittsburgh people who have a Pittsburgh reading and shopping habit. We don't have a large shopping mall in Butler County but there are three or four within a 30-45 minute drive. It makes for a tough situation as far as trying to interest them in our publications.

The city of Butler, where we're located, is right in the center of the county. As you'd expect, we do very well there, but as we go south towards Pittsburgh we hit such a Pittsburgh mentality that it makes it very difficult for our daily paper to sell there. We have weekly publica- tions that surround the county, more or less to 'keep the wolves out,' and we're extremely suc- cessful with them, but in spite of that you just don't get the feeling you'd like to have of ownership of the territory.

What about your advertiser base?
We have major retailers like Sears, Target and Dick's Sporting Goods. But we have lived off the automobile business for a number of years. Of course, that's up until the last three months. Still, from what I've been reading in the trades, we've been able to maintain better than most. We're such a primary buy that it's awfully tough for auto dealers not to be in our product.

The other area where we're extremely suc- cessful is in real estate. We have our own home-delivered real estate book like the 'pick up' books that you see in every mar- ket that you go to. We started our own little quarter folded book like that, but we deliver once a month with our newspaper into every home in Butler County. And it's now gotten to the point where it's almost impossible for the real estate people to get a listing unless they tell homeowners they will advertise in the Butler Eagle's Marketplace. It's delivered with the daily and the weekly publications.

How have things changed since you started in the business?
Since I started, the biggest change proba- bly was USA Today. I was with Thomson and I was working in the corporate office when USA Today hit the streets, and we all laughed and gave it 6 months. It didn't make sense to us that they could put out a nationwide publication that basically was all briefs and a lot of fluff, and we couldn't imagine who their advertisers would end up being.

The joke was on all of us, because it obviously worked out fine. They did an excellent job with staffing and distribution, and people were perfectly happy with a paper to look at for 10 minutes in an air- port and throw away. That was the biggest, single thing that changed in the business.

I also really came in on the tail end of newspapers being delivered by mail. The US Postal Service used to be a huge factor in delivering daily newspapers. We got them into the post office early in the morning and they actually delivered them the same day in a lot of rural areas. Today, if I want to get a newspaper delivered 30 miles away from here I'm lucky if it gets there in 4 or 5 days. At one point in time, this newspaper had nearly 2000 mail subscriptions; now we have maybe 150.

How are you handling delivery today?
We're an afternoon daily, and about 60% of our delivery is carrier based. We have a little over 300 merchant carriers that are still out delivering. We deliver our daily that way and the rest by adult motor carri- ers. We still use tubes. Our competitors here in Western Pennsylvania have joined the Midwest with the idea that it's all right to just pitch things out the window. We've resisted that. We still put tubes up and have insisted that our carriers go over to them. But I've noticed that both Pittsburgh papers have now gone that way.

It will be interesting to watch and see how that's accepted here, with our weather and even the age factor of our residents. Senior citizens really aren't that keen on going out and looking for the paper in their yard in the snow.

That raises the question about what you're doing to address your aging readership.
Western Pennsylvania, outside of Florida, has the highest demographics as far as sen- ior citizens go. I don't know why. I wish I could come up with that. It probably ties directly to what we've always claimed is a much better work ethic than what exists in many other places. And I think that maybe they take more ownership in their communities than a lot of other places that are more transient. People stay here and that's good for keeping newspaper cir- culation numbers up while so many news- papers are focusing on how to capture that 18-35 market? We certainly have to look at that direction too, but we also have to provide something for our older readers. And they are different things. We know our senior citizens want to read communi- ty news. They're still very interested in things like the church page, menus page and that type of thing. Those things are throwaway pages for younger readers.

So how are you handling that balancing act from an editorial standpoint?
I guess maybe no better than anyone else is. We're trying to give them more in the way of entertainment. Our newspaper is trying to evolve into more of an entertainment product than just a news product. We also realize that we're competing with many more factions for that 15-30 minutes a day that used to be spent reading the newspa- per. Today, there are so many options. If you don't deliver a package that is bright, colorful, interesting, you're just not going to be able to compete for your reader's time. We just installed a new press three years ago. And we went to full color capacity. We can now put out a 48-page paper that has 32 pages of full color and 16 pages of spot color. So we have no reason to put out a black and white page. None whatsoever.

What are you doing with your online product?
We're much different than other newspa- pers, particularly papers our size. Our entire paper is available online -- all stories, all photos, all ads. However, we have two classifications of readership -- paid and free -- and the free version has limitations.

We have Butler Eagle Online and Butler Eagle Online Gold. With Butler Eagle Online you can only get the headlines and the first paragraphs of each story in the paper. You can access all of the photos, all of the engagements, all of the weddings, all of the sports photos...you can see all that, you can see all of the classified line ads, but if you want the complete story, then you have to subscribe.

We only charge $3.00/month for the full subscription for anybody. However, if you also have a home delivered subscription, we only charge $1.00/month. We have almost 1,200 people paying $3.00/month to access the full newspaper online. The Gold version is an enhanced product. In addition to full story coverage, we actu- ally do provide some things online that we don't in print. If we send a photographer out to take a picture of a football game, he might take 20 pictures, and we put one in the paper. We'll choose probably another half dozen and put those online only for our Gold subscribers. We also put a lot of extra society-type photos, reminiscent of when newspapers used to be big on doing society pages. We might run one picture from that in the paper, but if we took pictures of 12 couples we put all of them on Butler Eagle Gold.

I was talking to one of my local competi- tors and he's had his website going on two years now. His ABC report showed he has six paying subscribers. But he's tried to charge what he does for his newspaper. We went for $3.00 because quite frankly that more than covers our costs. Our web- site has been profitable from day one. On an average day, we have just under 6000 unique users on our website. And we find that about 80% of our paying subscribers hit during the workday.

A lot of people give the online product as a gift. We've maintained a lot of contact with college kids this way. We used to just mail college kids subscriptions, but after the first semester they were likely to cancel it. Instead, we started promoting to parents the idea of getting your kid an online subscrip- tion for school, and that's been a big hit.

How do you feel about the future?
Well, I keep picking up all of these publica- tions that are full of doomsayers. If you predict that things are going to go bad long enough, you eventually have to be right.

It amazes me that newspapers continue to publish stories written by their own employees predicting their doom. In the past month alone I have read two articles by prominent columnists predicting the death of the newspaper.

You know we have all evolved for a long, long time. My company is 100 yrs old. Knight Ridder has been around a long time. Scripts has been around a long time. They have gone through more changes than what we're just looking at today.

Our biggest threat, without question, is the Internet. There's no question about it. We need to figure out how to leverage it to our advantage. It's an integral part now of our entire plan. But TV couldn't take us down, and radio couldn't take us down.

Where in the world would the online services get their news if it wasn't for the newspaper? We are still the source of news.

As long as radio and TV have been in business, they still have nothing compared to the newsgathering abilities that newspa- pers have. We are the ones that go out and dig the stories. None of the online services have their own newsgathering. It all is coming from print.

So, how do we feed off that? How do we use that to our advantage? We could sit here and say 'Oh my God, what are we gonna do?' Or we can get off of our butts and figure out a way to use it. When peo- ple ask me why my circulation isn't down, I say, 'because it isn't allowed to be.'

I'm just an old circulation director. But one thing I know is that I have always had to take other people's ideas and use them to our advantage. And that is what we have to do as an industry today.