COMMENTARY: 65 years as stewards of a community trust – New Jersey Hills

When our parents, Cort and Nancy Parker, bought The Bernardsville News in 1957, just about the only interstate highway in New Jersey was the New Jersey Turnpike.

But as reporters for the Newark News, then the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, they were aware of plans to build out a whole network of interstates that would, among other things, open up the bucolic farmland of Morris, Somerset and Hunterdon counties to development.

They knew that Bernardsville and surrounding communities, where Dad’s extended family had deep roots, would not remain idyllic, semi-rural hamlets for much longer.

Dad was 36, Mom 28, with three kids under age five and a fourth on the way. They were idealistic and energetic, and the thought of playing a role in how these communities handled the onslaught of suburbia spoke to their post-World War II idealism about “Big D” democracy and “being useful.”

Forty years later, when they both officially retired from the papers, Dad was characteristically modest in his remarks about how that all worked out. “I would say that we had mixed results in helping shape events” he acknowledged, but “we tried to do our part” which as he saw it – and as Liz and I continue to see it – is primarily to cover local government, without fear or favor.

Early Growth

After more than a decade of intense focus on improving editorial quality, accompanied by increasingly worrisome financial losses, the papers began to break even, but only after Dad acted on the advice of a sage family elder who introduced him to the concept of “economies of scale.”

In the newspaper world, circa 1970, that meant expanding your coverage area and producing more newspapers to keep the expensive press equipment from sitting idle.

And so the Recorder Publishing Co. expanded into Hunterdon, northern Morris and eventually western Essex counties. Savvy and loyal advertisers like Jim Weichert, the Turpin family, the Welsh Jeep dealership, and the late Steve Kalafer of Flemington Ford played a big role in our survival and eventual success.

More importantly, so did a dedicated staff of employees, led by Jim Parks and Lois Martin. Many of our colleagues have worked with us for more than 30 years. Linda Campbell and Phil Nardone have worked at the papers for more than 50.

It was an all-consuming life for our parents, and Mom began to refer, only half in jest, to our house just up the road from headquarters as the “office annex.”

While Dad was shining a flashlight on the sometimes too-cozy relationship between some town officials and local real estate developers, Mom was developing what used to be known as the women’s pages into a powerhouse must-read section of the newspaper.

And she was cultivating a roster of well-educated, civic minded friends, such as Rachel Mullen and Marian Mundy, as book reviewers, food columnists, art critics and humor columnists.

Our parents were a real team, and Liz and I to this day marvel at what they accomplished during their stewardship.

For their four children, it was hard not to notice the excitement in their life, a true business and marital partnership. Unlike a lot of our friends who could not begin to explain what their father did for a living, we could: “Dad comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.”

So it’s hardly surprising that two of their four children made the newspapers their life’s work.

Our Generation

Liz and I, who had both worked at the paper in various capacities growing up, came back to the business from different angles.

While I had been editor of my high school and college newspapers, Mom and Dad encouraged me after college to check out the business side of things, an area where they felt underprepared. So, dutifully, I got my master’s degree in business administration with a focus on media management.

Liz had considered law school while working after college at a small daily newspaper in Ohio. But when the powerhouse Asbury Park Press called, she jumped at the opportunity – and became known as the Mayor Slayer along the Jersey Shore for her investigative pieces back in the late 70s.

Liz came back to the papers first, in 1982, in response to the retirement of Art Swanson, the papers’ long-time managing editor. I still had a few more wild oats to sow in NYC and, after five years on Wall St. evaluating other managers’ performance, heeded Dad’s call for help on the business side and came aboard in 1988, full of ideas about how to expand into what were then real growth markets.

Some pretty savvy businessmen also saw those opportunities, and we had quite a time of it fighting off the Forbes operation and other very well-financed competitors.

But our readers, advertisers, and colleagues were loyal to us, and hold them off we did. We doubled the size of the business during the next decade and into the early 2000s. We went from 6 to 14 paid newspapers during this period.

The advent of the internet and social media proved to be a more daunting, if less personal, challenge.

And coincident with the hollowing out of our local downtowns wreaked by the rise of the digital platforms as well as Amazon, the primary engine of our local economy, the residential real estate market, essentially flatlined for almost 20 years.

We were no longer a growth company in a growing state looking for new markets while fending off deep-pocketed competitors. Instead, by the time of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, we were a “dead tree” business coping with a lousy state economy, fighting to survive hurricanes, floods, as well as the internet.

Keeping An Eye

On The Ball

That ordeal started over a decade ago. But, unlike a lot of other newspapers in New Jersey, we’ve survived, because we stuck to our knitting. Sending a reporter to cover town meetings week in and week out is expensive, and many of our daily newspaper brethren, looking to cut costs, gutted their editorial staffs.

They justified those cuts by citing numerous reader surveys purporting to show that “no one cares about local government.” Readers were said to prefer more “soft” news – i.e more news of the Kardashians! But it turns out that social media can satisfy that particular need, and at lower cost.

And the dailies’ circulation has vanished – along with the promise of digital advertising that fueled the hopes and dreams of online newspaper start-ups.

Thanks to some judicious outsourcing of production functions and the loyalty of our readers and subscribers –and the support of a tremendously dedicated and understanding staff – we’ve been able to stay focused on our core mission.

In almost all our communities, we are now the only news organization consistently covering local government and school boards; we are the proverbial “last man standing.”

Despite those infamous reader surveys, it turns out that enough civic-oriented people do want to know about their schools, their government, and their taxes. They want that news on a regular basis, not sporadically. And they want their newspaper to play it straight, with equal opportunity provided for both sides of an argument.

Most importantly, enough people are willing to pay for that service so we can keep the presses rolling — for which we are mightily grateful! By the way, most people do still prefer to read their newspaper in print, although we offer everything on digital platforms as well.

If Liz and I were 20 years younger, we would continue the good fight – but time is a thief, and a year or two ago we discovered that we are no longer young. We also discovered that the pool of buyers for our newspapers was, and is, distinctly unappealing.

So-called vulture capitalists like Alden Capital, which is operated by a recent graduate of the nearby Pingry School, have a role to play in capitalism – but not community journalism.

We did not want to sell to a hedge fund that would strip the company of its cash flow and then discard the carcass before heading on to the next acquisition.

Newspapers are a quasi-public utility, certainly a public trust, with a unique role in our democracy, particularly now when local elected officials can be a bulwark against the national polarization that is threatening to tear our democracy apart.

No one truly ever owns a good newspaper; at best you get to be its custodian, a steward of a community trust.

Liz and I hope you agree that our family has been a good steward for the past 65 years. We have certainly worked hard to gain and retain your trust.

Like our parents, we too have tried to “do our part,” to cover these wonderful local communities without fear or favor.

We are passing the baton of stewardship to the Corporation for New Jersey Local Media and we are confident that they, too, will have a good run!