Inside the Historic Keene Sentinel: Local News in America Project

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Hello and thank you for joining us. I'm Jaci Clement, and in this episode of Fast Chat, we continue our series That we call the Local News in America series, with a look at the Keene Sentinel, which began publishing in 1799. And joining us today, we're very fortunate to have Thomas Ewing, who is the owner and publisher of the Keene Sentinel. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Jaci. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Well, we're, we're thrilled because we know, uh, You're running one of the most historic newspapers we have in the country that I believe the key phrase is you've continuously published under the same name since 1799.

Since 1799, right. I think the 5th oldest in that measurement.

Okay. Why don't we start out with you telling me how you ended up at the Sentinel since you do have a law background.

I consider myself a recovering lawyer. 30 years ago, after about 10 years of practice in New York City, I found out through my father, who owned and ran a community newspaper in western New York State where I grew up, that his older brother, Jim Ewing, who was then the publisher of the Sentinel and a co-owner, he and his wife were going to be selling it.

And my father asked if I was interested and I hadn't really thought about it, but it seemed like a pretty unique and wonderful opportunity.

We worked out a deal, and now I'm the editor of the Sentinel. I have been for 30 years.

And is it everything you thought it would be?

Well, I think it's certainly very different than I thought it would be.

When I got here 30 years ago, print was obviously the only, only thing that newspapers did in those days. Not long after I got to the Sentinel, we started an audio text service, which was a phone-based information service, but that was the first sort of foray into anything electronic that we had done. Newspapers in those days, even community newspapers, were looked to for not just community news, but for national and international news as well. And that's less of a problem these days, particularly in our non-print condition.

We hear a lot about the state of local news. In particular, there's quite a bit of Coverage talking about the death of local news or the dying of local newspapers. What's your take on that?

Well, it's certainly very disturbing, um, because I think it is happening in some places, or too many places. Economic model isn't there for, uh, for local newspapers to thrive in the way that they used to. And I, I think it's not a good development for the, for the country, uh, because I think Um, the best form, uh, the best, best informed, uh, readership is what makes the best decisions for our community. And, um, and if they're not getting the news and information they need, then I think things can suffer, um, in their local communities as a result.

Do you see any bright spots or hope for the future with local news? I do.

Um, I, I think there's been some really innovative, uh, developments, particularly in the nonprofit space, digital startups in particular, that have really stepped into some communities and done some great work. There's much more collaboration that's going on among news organizations.

In our own case, we're members of something called the Granite State News Collaborative, which we joined with a bunch of other news organizations, not just newspapers in the state. To collaborate on coverage of matters and to share. I think there's been some really good moves by certainly nonprofits, but even for-profit organizations, make a better case to their communities for why they should be supported, community support in ways that never would have happened before other than through buying a subscription to a print edition. Or buying a newspaper on a newsstand.

And so, um, I think those are all pretty encouraging.

Um, national nonprofit organizations have really stepped up their support, and there's even been some interest in, at the governmental level, in making sure that community news organizations and local news can continue to serve their constituencies.

So tell me, how is the Keene Sentinel doing these days?

Well, I would say it's been a challenging couple of years for us ever since the economy turned about a year and a half ago when inflation took off.

What had been a steady deterioration in the advertising side of things caused advertising to completely fall off, or almost completely. And that has really heightened our need to continue something we've been emphasizing for a decade or so, which is strengthening reader support. Some of that comes through increased subscription rates, both in print and online, and it's really accelerated our efforts to move readers into a digital space because that's certainly down the road where you're more likely to be than reading a print edition.

So it's been a bit of an accelerating challenge over the last year and a half because as revenues have softened.

We also find ourselves in a period of scarcity of workers. It's a regional and a national problem.

And so we've been under pretty heavy wage pressure as a result of that.

So you combine the 2 and higher expenses, lower revenue.

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, for people that aren't familiar with the Sentinel, Can you give us some insight into how you work when you come out, what kind of staff size you're working with, those sorts of things?

We have a print edition that's 6 days a week.

The Saturday edition is a weekend edition. It's sort of a more traditional weekend package kind of thing.

And we are still, technically speaking, an afternoon paper.

We go to press sort of late morning-ish. And be out on the newsstands by noon, with home deliveries occurring into the afternoon. The weekend paper is a morning-delivered paper on Saturday mornings.

But we, we are much more digitally oriented in how we're pushing out news these days.

So when we have a story, we're pushing it out almost right away once it's ready to go. And that can happen on a number of platforms.

Mm-hmm.

Obviously, a website, the way many newspapers do, but there's e-editions, which are sort of the digital version of a print form. We have newsletters, and then there's a certain amount of, a fair amount of pushing things out on social media as well, all with the goal of informing people and also driving them to the fuller covers they can find on our website.

Okay. And what size staff are you dealing with today?

So we're probably in the, in the mid-50s, I would say, which is maybe half to two-thirds of what we used to be when I first came to the Sentinel 30 years ago.

I see. Do you do any writing?

I am a member of the editorial board and chip in and write an editorial a week.

How would you describe your editorial stance?

How I might describe it is probably very different than how many of our readers might describe it.

We had a reader survey once that came back that said that our editorials were too liberal.

As many people thought they were too liberal as thought they were too conservative. So there is an issue of perception there. I would say we tend to be more liberal on social matters and moderate on fiscal matters.

Our region of New Hampshire, which is referred to as the Monadnock region, which is the name of the predominant geographic feature, Mount Monadnock, is viewed pretty much in a New Hampshire context as a Democratic-leaning area. And so I suspect we're identified in that way by a lot of people.

Have you given any thought to actually getting rid of editorials? Because I know that's also a conversation that is being taken place because some people feel that Newspapers don't distinguish between editorials and news.

It's certainly something we've talked about. We haven't made that decision yet.

We continue to feel, at least for the time being, that there's value to offering our perspective on matters. 30 years ago, when we were running an editorial a day, many of our editorials were related to national and international developments as much as on local matters.

We don't really do that anymore.

The only time we might tend to comment on national or international matters were if there was some local connection.

I think a subset within the editorial discussion, the discussion of whether to continue editorial, is also whether to do endorsements or not, and we sort of go back and forth on that. For the time being, we are continuing to do that.

Even within that arena, we don't do endorsements in, uh, for local races where we don't feel, um, the candidates have sufficient other platforms for opinions about them to be formed. So for instance, we don't do endorsements for city council races.

Just out of curiosity, what's your track record with those that you have endorsed?

Well, so we have this thing called the New Hampshire primary, for instance, presidential.

I've heard of it. Yeah.

And we have over the years where there have been competitive races, we've endorsed in both primaries.

Given our more moderate stance, our endorsements on the Republican side, I wouldn't have had say have had great sway, although there have been some instances where the people we've endorsed have won.

And it's somewhat the same on the Democratic side too.

When we do endorsements, even our approach on editorials generally is to try and write them in a way that's informative and reasoned rather than just a, you know, here's what we think and you should think this way too kind of editorial. And so, even if voters don't end up agreeing with our position, I'd like to think that we're doing a service of informing them as to why we believe on the issues or whatever might be important to come to a conclusion of endorsing a particular candidate.

Now, it's that time of year because we're in political season. You get quite an interesting cast of characters coming through your doors.

We do, although it's gonna be interesting to see how much that happens in the upcoming primary. Not expecting much action on the Democratic side at all.

President Biden is not even running in the New Hampshire primary because of the dispute over New Hampshire preceding when the Democratic Party wants them to hold their primary.

There are a couple of candidates on the Democratic side that have filed.

How they're gonna be campaigning, I think, remains to be seen.

On the Republican side, they tend to focus more on other parts of the state because that's where their voters are.

I'm not sure that's always the wisest thing, but what we tend to see over time is sort of as the primary gets closer, Republicans will sometimes, if they think there's a chance of picking up some voters from over here because The New Hampshire primary, as you may know, is an open primary.

So if you're not registered in a particular party, you can go to the polls on primary day and register to vote in a particular party's primary. And you are then—

if you say you want to vote in the Republican primary, you register as a Republican for about the time it takes you to vote, and then you can unregister on your way out. And so that's a way that candidates might feel over in this region, they might be able to pick up some additional voters. Even though the number of Republicans aren't as great over here as they are in other parts of the state.

I'm curious, out of the politicians whose names we would know, who treated the staff the best?

You mean over the years? Mm-hmm.

Hmm, that's an interesting question.

I remember John Kasich a few years ago. I guess he was running in 2016. Most recently, I think he might have had some kind of newspaper background. I'm not, I'm not quite sure of that.

But after he got through the interview with us, an editorial board interview, he then wanted to wander around the building and watch the newsroom in action and chat with people. And not in sort of a glad-handing, please vote for me kind of way, but just he was kind of interested in what was going on. I thought that was pretty nice and pretty unusual.

Barack Obama wanted to go shake hands with everybody, and and Joe Biden, you know, he he has a reputation as a backslapping kind of guy, and he certainly lived up to it while he was with us. John McCain, 2000, when he was totally unknown and had no staff, he was in our offices a lot and just wanted to chat with people. You know, they're all pretty interesting people, and they wouldn't be successful politicians if they didn't have some measure of.

of being charismatic and engaging. So, um, they're good at it.

It's always interesting, um, to get the little tidbits of behind the scenes. So for people that haven't been to Keene, give us a, give us a sense of what the biggest issues are in the community. What do they care about? And really, what is your role in informing them? I'm not sure if you have much in the way of local competition for news going on there.

Not really. Certainly from a traditional newspaper standpoint, there's not much competition now.

The one statewide newspaper, the Union Leader out of Manchester, doesn't really cover this part of the state.

Where we are in the southwest corner of New Hampshire, we have some traditional newspaper competition on our borders.

There's a pretty strong weekly off to the east in In a town called Peterborough, and there's a pretty strong daily and an interesting and good nonprofit weekly that started up in Brattleboro, which is just across the river in Vermont. Neither of those really get in towards the core of our region a whole lot. And so otherwise, the only meaningful competition comes really from a local news radio station, which Doesn't tend to do so much coverage, but it does have some interesting, uh, talk shows and be informative.

And as for issues, it's a region, uh, New Hampshire generally, and this region as well, has really suffered, um, in the opioid epidemic that's been going on.

So substance abuse has been a real issue.

Housing has been, uh, affordable housing is a real problem.

Um, In the state generally, and very much so in our region. Workforce development is a problem.

Everybody complains about property taxes all the time, and, and childcare, the absence of affordable childcare is a real problem. We, we focused a lot on this in our, in our coverage.

We recognized housing as an issue several years ago, and actually Assigned a reporter to it as a beat and to try and highlight it.

Editorially, we've been strong on some of the issues.

The substance abuse issue has spilled over into a concern about mental health care that's available or unfortunately not available in many cases.

Right.

And so there's been a lot— we've tried to keep a lot of attention on that. And then workforce development is, uh, it's been something that we've tried to, um, address, uh, quite a bit in our coverage as well.

And how did COVID impact the area?

It was interesting. Uh, we're kind of an area that turned out to be a little, be attractive to some folks to relocate to work remotely from. So there was that, that actually put a lot of pressure on the real estate market around here, and it has contributed to the lack of affordable housing.

Otherwise, I would say COVID had about the kind of effect that it had in a lot of places. It caused some businesses to close up. It put pressure on the workforce, led to more remote working than used to be the case.

But I would say things have generally rebounded reasonably well.

It's just that in the current economic state with the the pressures on wages and housing costs, it's created some strains for local businesses as a result.

I see. So if I were to walk down the Main Street of Keene, what would that look like today?

Anybody who's watching and is interested in a storefront in Main Street in Keene, there are a couple available, but it's a, it's a reasonably vibrant downtown. Historically, it had— it claimed to have the—

Keene claimed to have the widest Main Street in the country. I don't think that's the case anymore because there's a median down the middle and trees. But it's kind of a classic New England town with a main street that comes up to a town square, which is actually a circle, but we call it a square. Congregational, white congregational church at the head of the square that sort of predominates the whole downtown. And so it's a pretty Pretty attractive place to visit, and the downtown businesses have done a decent job of mixing up what it is they have to offer to keep attracting people downtown.

Okay, and what are the demographics like of your population?

Well, like a lot of New Hampshire, it's still sort of predominantly white, but the percentage of minorities is increasing.

That's partly a function of recruiting that's been happening by some of our larger businesses. And some, some of it's a result of proximity to Boston as people move out from Boston this way. The diversity is increasing, but it's certainly by no measure what you would see in other parts of the country.

I'm curious, since we're coming into the political season, or at least Well into it at this point. Wouldn't you expect a fair amount of political advertising?

You can't get away from it on the one statewide television channel or the Boston television channels.

Certainly at the national political level, the consultants have gone away from print advertising for years now. So about the only time we see any of that is when there's no more airtime to be bought up. And the election's close at hand, and then maybe we'll get some last-minute ads that way.

We do see some advertising come in digitally, and so that happens. But it's pretty heavily television-oriented these days.

Channel 9, which is located in Manchester, is everyone's And then they built a new wing after every primary.

They do get a lot of advertising.

How are you basically diversifying your business model? We're seeing some organizations that are relying a lot on doing special events. So how would you describe your mix?

Well, like many newspapers, I suspect we were predominantly advertising-based, certainly 30 years ago when I started. with the Sentinel.

So that would have been anywhere from 70 to 80% revenue, and now we're over half from reader revenue sources. So that would be subscriptions.

In the last few years, we've grown community support quite a bit.

It's been sort of targeted support.

So when we've gone out to the community to ask for their help, it's been to support particular initiatives we've had underway. So we've used that to fund a statehouse reporter, for instance. Which we've never had as long as— as far as I know at the Sentinel.

And we've used it to fund what we call the Health Reporting Lab, which is focused just on health issues of the region.

It supports a dedicated reporter as well as freelance support as well.

Community support has become increasingly important.

We have dived into events quite a bit, and that's a significant and we think a growing source of revenue for us.

We've been quite successful with some of them.

It's been kind of a win-win because not only is it a chance to sell sponsorships and to raise revenue to support our other operations, The type of events we, I think, helps strengthen our bonds with the community because some of the events are honoring, say, extraordinary women in the region or up-and-coming professionals, local athletes, and the community really gets behind them and really appreciates the recognition that comes out of them. And it just, when you then go out to the community, or either with subscription rate increases or a request for help supporting a journalism initiative. I think that it helps the appreciation for that and the understanding of the need for it. And so that's been a really good diversification for us.

We've also added some niche publications. We're like the cook, the pasta cook throwing spaghetti at the wall.

We're trying everything.

Have you given any thought to the nonprofit model?

We have. We've looked at it quite a bit. We're not quite sure where those considerations would go. And there are variations of it that are interesting as well. So it's a little hard to say where that might end up.

Okay. So I'm wondering, after 30 years of doing this, why do you still do it?

Well, there's some mornings I wonder myself. I think the thing that I really still find quite energizing is the idea that what we do serves a need in the community.

that wouldn't otherwise be served, and, um, and that is, is helpful to the community. Um, and so, so there's that.

That's just, that's sort of our core mission.

And if we're doing that, then that's, I find that to be very, um, energizing.

Um, and then for me personally, the idea that, uh, we just continue to try and figure out ways to keep doing that, uh, in an, in a Pretty challenging business is a fun challenge and one that I think it's very important that we succeed at.

And so that keeps me going.

When you're out in the community and you're talking to people, what is your favorite feedback from the public?

Well, I would say probably the It's a small thing, but just to have people say, well, I read this article in the paper, I saw this online, this piece you had online, and to realize that maybe they wouldn't have known about something if they hadn't seen that, and that it's factored in their thinking about things, I think that's pretty gratifying.

It was kind of a surprise to me when the Local chamber named us a business of the year a few years ago because, uh, typically over the years businesses have complained that we don't support them adequately. And it, to me, it was kind of a recognition that stemmed from a greater appreciation of what a local newspaper can do for a community, um, and an appreciation for what we were doing. So that was, that was pretty gratifying too. And actually, It's common now to have people, when they read about other areas, other places in the country where newspapers are struggling, they want to know how we're doing. And so that's a measure of the fact that they care.

Is there anything we didn't cover that you wanted to add?

One thing we are doing on the journalism side of things is we are really, as part of our effort to build our engagement with the community even more is we are emphasizing greater transparency, greater emphasis on solutions journalism.

We've been part of the Trusting News Initiative, which you may have heard of, and we are trying to pivot our—

the way we interact with people in a much more engagement-focused way.

We hired a— actually promoted a person into a position called Managing Editor for Audience Engagement, which was a mouthful I never thought I would be saying 30 years ago. But it's worked out wonderfully for us, and it's helped us understand even better Something that I think is critical is that there are lots of ways that people consume their news, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a print format. It doesn't need to be in a website format. It can be in a newsletter. It can be in a social media post or the like.

Mm-hmm.

And we've got to figure out how to serve the desire to get news in those ways. For our region.

So that's great. And I think that's a great place to wrap it up. So I want to say thank you very much for your time and for, and for keeping the Sentinel alive and meaningful.

Well, we're coming up on our 225th anniversary next year, so we have to—

that's certainly our immediate target, but we're certainly hoping to keep going for many, many years.

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