Doubters pay up: Daily Sun nears one-year anniversary

If you were among those who bet that Portland's new daily paper "will never make it a year," get ready to pay up.
The Daily Sun turns one year old tomorrow.
To commemorate the anniversary, we're turning this column over to a week of discussion about the future of newspapers. As I've noted before, it's an uneasy topic for those of us trained to think that everybody wants to see the baby, but nobody wants to discuss the labor.
Except of course when they do, and newspapers are being as hotly debated now as they were when we launched a year ago. The national narrative is still on track – "newspapers are doomed."
Like nearly every other national narrative I've had personal insight into, it's a lie.
I used to think it was just "wrong," and fell short of a lie because nobody intended to deceive anybody. Well, I was wrong about that.
You just can't defend that point of view any longer. The fact is that some people made reckless financial decisions and then covered their tracks by blaming a collapsing industry.
Sure, the crashing economy ended the Ponzi scheme for newspapers as it did for many, but just like the Wall Street bankers and mortgage cheaters, the big newspaper companies were rolling on other people's money. In bankruptcy after bankruptcy, they are lining up to "erase" hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt
It came down to blaming themselves or blaming the economy and/or the Internet. The earlier proposition retained the bonus structure.
At least the national narrative has moderated somewhat. Most serious discussions now admit that it's the large urban papers that face extinction as they battle debt, recession and Internet issues. Smaller papers are not exactly laughing all the way to the bank; they've been hit by the economy just like everyone else. But in many cases, and especially for those papers that are independently owned, we're holding our own. And some longstanding free dailies are actually reporting that 2009 was among their stronger financial years, a result of advertisers panicked into trying something new that works.
Those who argue otherwise often point to the closings of big dailies in Denver and Seattle as proof that newsprint is history.
Indeed, those closings are good examples of what's wrong with newspapers – what's wrong is how we cover the news.
Both those closings fit the national narrative, so nobody bothered with the detail that they were Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) papers. The JOA is an exemption to the nation's monopoly laws, giving newspapers a chance to combine in a way that's illegal unless the Justice Department gives the go-ahead. The papers get to merge business operations – a price-fixers dream – while keeping "independent editorial voices."
That means you consolidate the profit centers, then endure the cost centers as long as you can. They create weak place holders that block actual innovation.
The Denver Daily News, a free paper in Colorado's largest city, has benefited greatly by the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. Nobody would confuse the two papers, and "the Rocky" is a true loss ... but in five years, we'll see.
What happened to newspapers is actually what happened to thousands of homeowners around the country: Somebody bought more than they could afford, and when the economy went weak they couldn't keep up the payments.
That's why some papers are doing what many homeowners had to do – selling at much less than they paid, and selling off what they can. We see the newly purchased Portland Press Herald moving out of it's iconic home across from City Hall because it survived, in large part, by selling its building.
The fact is that newspapers are what they've always been – a dynamic industry with some winners and losers every year. On the free daily newspaper front, we've seen launches in Colorado and California and the politically focused POLITICO remains a well-known startup success.
In Portland, the question I get most second-most often is: why here?
For me, there are personal reasons among that answer, but they pale compared to the objective reasons. Free daily newspapers are one part of a rising sustainable journalism trend, where internet sites and print publications are owned by reporters and designed to remain small and thus sustained by local business. Some in our industry call these papers "micro-dailies," but that can be deceptive because there's nothing "micro" about their cultural impact.
Just like in farming, restaurants and retailing, smaller can be better for publishing. Smaller papers rely less on large corporate accounts and more on locally owned business. They are often, like this one, locally controlled so they are more responsive to the community. And, at least in my opinion, they are just a lot more fun.
So you need a community with a vibrant locally owned business environment, with "news making" music and arts where people care about their schools and communities. If you doubt this is that city, then sit in my chair for a week and take the calls – oh, my, but people do care.
The most-asked question, especially from our fans, is: "How's it going?"
Well, quite well, actually. We'll be around for a long while.
And that's important to know in this media environment. As recently as last fall, a Down East Magazine blogger reported our imminent demise – this despite our flat-out assurances that the "rumors" were bogus. The "sources?" Only two, both unnamed of course, but even the blogger admitted one was a competitor.
Updates of such reports are useless, because those planting them know the blogs are not widely read. Often, the purpose is to fax the "reports" around, hoping to convince potential advertisers we're not going to be around.
Such rumors have suspiciously cropped up every few months for the past year. It's unlikely they will ease despite our milestone.
So, hopefully, a few of those folks are among those paying up after betting against us.

(Tomorrow: the real reason 92 percent of college students read their daily campus papers, but most are not reading a paper after graduation.)

(Curtis Robinson is editor of The Portland Daily Sun. Contact him at curtis@portlanddailysun.me.)