Eureka Reporter Waves The White Flag

Opinion page to merge with the Times-Standard, printing press to remain open

Humboldt Sentinel
11/6/08
By Charles Douglas

EUREKA -- The newspaper war of the North Coast is over, with the sesquicentenarian Times-Standard victorious over the five-year-old Eureka Reporter, which announced late yesterday that it would cease operations with its final edition on Saturday.

Owned by Security National, a corporation controlled by tax attorney and Republican activist Rob Arkley, The Eureka Reporter commenced operations as an on-line publication in 2003, moving to print the following year and to daily editions of the newspaper in 2007, although this was cut back to five-days-a-week earlier this year. Although the politics of its editorial board were perceived as somewhat neoconservative in slant, the paper received widespread praise for its design, photography and in-depth local news coverage, as well as several awards in such categories from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

For their part, the Times-Standard took an adversarial position towards the Reporter from the beginning, running ad campaigns to juxtapose its reputation against their own as the longest-running daily newspaper on the North Coast. The daily, as part of the Media News Group chain of newspapers owned by Denver billionaire Dean Singleton, always had the advantage of inter-outlet resources, internal staff recruitment services and financial support from its corporate parent.

This increasingly heated competition was noted by other media such as the San Francisco Chronicle last year, which referred to the commercial contest as an "old-fashioned newspaper war."

The war spilled into the judicial system this fall when the parent company of the Times-Standard filed suit against the parent company of The Eureka Reporter for anti-competitive practices. This suit is now over, according to a Times-Standard quote of their owner Singleton, although the paper was silent as to what the terms of any out-of-court settlement might be. Some observers suggest private negotiations may be responsible for the joint announcement by the Times-Standard and The Eureka Reporter that the opinion page of the Reporter would appear twice a week in the print and on-line editions of the remaining daily.

The Western Web printing press operations at their Samoa facility (which also generates the print editions of the North Coast Journal and The Arcata Eye) will remain in operation, leaving the fate of the current in-house printing operations of the Times-Standard in some doubt. There is no doubt, however, that the Reporter will see its final time in print on Saturday, and the operation of eurekareporter.com will cease after that day as well.

"Times have been difficult for the newspaper industry nationally and many fine papers have had to close their doors," stated the announcement from The Eureka Reporter. "It is difficult for a small community like Eureka to support more than one daily newspaper."

In a twist of fate, it was just over two years ago that a weekly Arcata-based newspaper, the Humboldt Advocate, went out of business after having been founded in 2004 as a liberal alternative to other local newspapers. After their publisher/editor/advertising director Shawn Warford blamed Arkley for his demise, Arkley responded in an e-mail to Warford that he was responsible for his own businesses' success or failure.

Security National's own financial position may have played a role in the shutdown of the Reporter, which is widely reputed to have been running a multi-million dollar annual deficit on the corporate balance sheet. On Oct. 20, Standard and Poor's removed Security National Servicing Corp. from its Select Servicer List as a residential mortgage subprime and special servicer, and cited the revision of the financial position of Security National Master Holding Co. from "sufficient" to "insufficient." This followed the move in August of Moody's Investment Service to downgrade the company's bond ratings due to "increasingly difficult market conditions."

Over a dozen banks in the U.S. have declared bankruptcy this year alone due to the meltdown of the domestic mortgage market, due largely to the kind of subprime loans Security National specializes in the servicing of.

The newspaper industry was already in a long-term decline in economic prowess prior to the current economic recession, daily newspapers in particular seeing massive declines in print edition subscribers. Just last week, the nationally distributed Christian Science Monitor announced that they were ceasing daily print editions in favor of increased on-line news coverage.

Charles Douglas is the publisher of the Humboldt Sentinel. He can be reached at his blog, Vagabond Journalist, at charlesdouglas.us.