Over the weekend, DMN publisher Jim Moroney was on NPR’s “On The Media,” talking about the “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” the bill that allows newspapers to become tax-exempt non-profits. If a paper opted for such status, it couldn’t make political endorsements. Co-host Brooke Gladstone asked Moroney about this. An alert FBvian relays Moroney’s response:
He said people come up to him all the time and say they use his paper’s endorsement list as their voter’s guide, so he couldn’t accept that proviso, but that if it were not in the bill he’d have no problem with it. When queried about the health of his own paper, he said this: “We are profitable, have remained profitable and basically have no debts, so we’re in great shape….we have continued to protect as much of our scale of journalists and journalistic resources in this market, adding pages to the paper….we have gone to our customers and said, ‘Look, we need to ask you to pay a greater proportion of the cost of publishing and distributing a newspaper to your home.’ In so doing, we’ve reduced our dependency on advertising. The typical model for newspapers has been 80% advertising and 20% revenue {from subscribers}. By this time next year, we’ll be something closer to 60-40, maybe even 55-45. To date, we’re about 80% through all of our renewals, and 92% of our subscribers have agreed to pay a higher price, and I’m very proud of that, and I don’t think we could have done it had we continued to cut our newsroom or continued to cut pages out of the paper.”
