Posted by chicagomedia.org on November 25, 2009 at 09:49:43:
Greater interactivity, pay walls, potential avenues to revive Sun-Times: CEO
By: Ann Saphir
Nov. 24, 2009
(Crain's) - While there's no panacea for the ills of the newspaper publishing business, small changes will help turn the tide at the money-losing publisher of Chicago's No. 2 paper, Sun-Times Media CEO Jeremy Halbreich said.
Among those changes will be pay walls for portions of the Web site with exclusive content, tie-ups with technology firms that can distribute and charge for the content more efficiently than Sun-Times, and potential increases in subscription prices, Mr. Halbreich told members of the City Club of Chicago at a downtown luncheon Tuesday.
The company has had preliminary talks with Steve Brill and his newly founded pay-for-news consulting venture, and has successfully run small-scale experiments charging for online content, Mr. Halbreich said.
While charging readers for digitally distributed content "will not be a panacea," he said, it will play a role in the turnaround of the company, which emerged last month from bankruptcy under the ownership of a group of investors led by Mesirow Financial CEO James Tyree.
Taken together, the various "bits and pieces" of change that he's instituting will generate millions of dollars of new revenue for the company, Mr. Halbreich said in an interview after the event.
Meanwhile Sun-Times Media continues to trim costs, not by continued layoffs or pay cuts, but by modernizing its billing and production systems, he said.
Mr. Halbreich is no stranger to turnarounds. He helped transform the Dallas Morning News, a stumbling No. 2 paper in a two-paper town, to the city's No. 1 paper, and later, as its president, to its only paper.
But eclipsing the Chicago Tribune - whose parent, Tribune Co., isn't expected to emerge from bankruptcy for another six months - isn’t a near-term goal for the company.
"Chicago is too big, too proud, too important to have only one paper covering its story," Group Publisher John Barron said. Indeed, lest the City Club's "coming out" party for the Sun-Times be interpreted as a bet on which paper might prevail, the club made sure that on each chair at Tuesday's event was a yellow flier touting its speaker for an event in January: Tribune Editor Gerould Kern.
But the Trib's dominance "means, in today's world, kind of boring," Mr. Halbreich told the audience of several hundred. Sun-Times, by contrast, is the "heart of the city," and that difference and others will allow the city to support two papers "for a long while."
Readers of the Sun-Times and the 58 suburban newspapers under the Sun-Times umbrella can expect more interactive content - video, for instance - as well as more "local local," he said.
"The concept here is to build a business that will be here for decades," said Mr. Tyree, who bought the company in a deal valued at about $26.5 million. As for why he bought it, he said, "This is a job that I took, No. 1, because it is a strong, strong business opportunity."