A mom-and-pop shop
“Our purchase of Community Newspapers in 2001 was a kind of swimming-against-the-tide move,” Purcell said on Friday. When he bought CNC from Fidelity Investments in a deal reported at around $150 million, Purcell was following the advice of his mentor, Rupert Murdoch: “You grow or you die.”
Having purchased the Herald from Murdoch in 1994, Purcell had been pushing hard to consummate a CNC deal since 1998, and he even mapped out a scenario to buy not only Fidelity’s operation but also the Ledger and Enterprise when they came on the market. That didn’t happen. But in 2002, Purcell made an effort to buy the Salem, Gloucester, and Newburyport dailies, which were snatched up by the Eagle-Tribune Co. He was a player.
But he has also had his hands full with CNC, an unwieldy Frankenstein’s monster of a newspaper chain that had been assembled in the ’90s by Fidelity under the direction of a mild-mannered venture capitalist named Bill Elfers.
Under Fidelity, CNC had its share of growing pains, including a corporate culture unfamiliar with the newspaper business and a revolving door of executives who tried and failed to turn its fortunes around.
By the mid ’90s, Fidelity had already invested about $100 million and CNC was still leaking red ink. (It is believed that CNC did turn a profit in its last few Fidelity years, particularly after significant job cuts.)
Then there’s the daunting task of being a good community-journalism steward. Papers like the Globe and the Herald may dominate the regional-media landscape. But many people have a more intimate and often more intense attachment to their local weekly.
At a June 2000 community-journalism forum sponsored by MassINC, one complaint about CNC’s coverage of Newton triggered such a torrent of criticism aimed at then–CNC editor in chief Mary Jo Meisner that the moderator had to keep the audience from turning into a lynch mob.
At UMass, Purcell said, “Fidelity made a mistake when amassing its empire. They thought they could have regional impact. As a result, they alienated all the people who were reading it” for local news. (Under Fidelity, for example, there was a three-person State House bureau churning out regional stories.)
If Purcell believed in local, he also appears to have been an advocate of trimming at CNC. According to numbers provided by Herald Media, the Herald itself has 673 FTEs (full-time positions). CNC and Herald Interactive, together, have another 924. At the time of the sale to Purcell, CNC alone had an employee roster of about 1200 — a number that at one time might have been as high as 1600.
Numbers in the Herald Media kit also put the total circulation of the CNC weeklies at about 485,000, while Fidelity claimed about 600,000 weekly subscribers when it sold the chain.
Stressing the mom-and-pop nature of the CNC enterprise, Purcell said on Friday that the operation probably has about 20,000 to 25,000 advertisers, and roughly 80 percent of them spend less than $2000 a year.
