'New Mexican' celebrates 175th in a changing landscape for newspapers

Nov. 16—Robin Martin doesn't remember having any philosophical discussions with her father about what it meant to be an independent newspaper owner — but she does remember him banging his head on the dining room table a couple of times.

"Yes, literally," said Martin, who in 2001 took over ownership of the Santa Fe New Mexican from her late father, Robert Moody McKinney.

Once, Martin said, was when then-Gov. Bruce King's wife was described in a cutline as his "first lay" rather than "first lady."

Another time, the head-banging was prompted by an "r" where it didn't belong, transforming "Las Vegas" into "Las Vergas," an obscenity in Spanish.

"He was doing it to be dramatic," Martin said, laughing.

The gesture may have been theatrical, but it demonstrated how invested he was in the paper's quality and success. And while they never had a formal discussion about leading the family business, Martin said she emulated her father's approach when she became owner of The New Mexican and The Taos News.

"With a locally owned paper, the owner lives in the community and knows what issues are important for the community to flourish," Martin said. "With a corporate or hedge fund ownership, the point of owning a newspaper is to make money. ... It's completely different."

That dynamic is part of what can make independently owned newspapers — like The New Mexican, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary this month — such strong community assets.

It's also what makes owning a newspaper a tough gig.

Corporate acquisitions

The New Mexican briefly went corporate during an economic squeeze; McKinney, who first bought the newspaper in 1948, sold it to Gannett in 1976. But he was unhappy with the way Gannett ran the paper and sued the chain for breach of contract, prevailing and winning the paper back after a 13-week trial.

The financial burdens only got tougher with the advent of the internet, the decline of print advertising revenue and the difficulty convincing digital readers to pay for subscriptions. Across the country, those trends have helped drive thousands of newspapers out of business.

More than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished since 2005, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism reported last month. Earlier this fall, for example, five newspapers in eastern Colorado announced they would either close or halt print publication in the span of just a few days, according to The Colorado Sun.

For years, large chains were active in gobbling up newspapers for sale, hollowing out the ranks of the country's independent newspaper owners.

Martin said there was a period when she was getting two or three inquiries every week about selling The New Mexican, a pace that dropped off after the 2008 recession.

On a national scale, those acquisitions have slowed recently, according to the Medill report.

"While large chains continue to control the largest share of newspapers, the past three years have been marked by increased activity from medium-size and small owners," the report said.

New Mexico investors

That newer trend has been accentuated in New Mexico, where local ownership is the rule rather than the exception, and two fairly new local organizations, El Rito Media LLC and Ctrl+P Publishing Group have been investing in New Mexico publications.

El Rito Media, an investment group headed by longtime oilman and former state Republican Party chair Harvey E. Yates Jr., started out by acquiring the Rio Grande Sun in Española two years ago, then picked up the Artesia Daily Press last year. Earlier this year, the company scooped up the Alamogordo Daily News, Carlsbad-Current Argus and Ruidoso News from newspaper giant Gannett.

Those acquisitions, and the sale this year of the Farmington Daily Times to Colorado-based Ballantine Communications Inc. — which shut it down — take Gannett's New Mexico holdings down to just a single outlet: the Las Cruces Sun-News.

Rich Connor, CEO of El Rito Media and the editor/publisher of all five publications, said since taking over the former Gannett newspapers in Southern New Mexico, he's been seeing 100 or more new subscriptions every week in Alamogordo, Carlsbad and Ruidoso combined. He said under Gannett, the papers each carried far less local news than they do now.

"These papers are loaded now in the last four months from front page to the back," Conner said. "We're getting an incredible reaction from readers unlike anything I've ever seen."

Meanwhile, Ctrl+P Publishing Group, led by former Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis, is creating online-only news opportunities. He started New Mexico Political Report in 2015 and City Desk earlier this year, as well as Albuquerque-based alt-weekly The Paper in 2020 in the wake of the closure of the Weekly Alibi.

His company also has picked up small publications in Corrales, Sandoval County and the East Mountains in recent years, as well as the Santa Fe Reporter just this summer.

Clara Garcia, the New Mexico Press Association's board president, says she finds the wave of acquisitions by both groups heartening.

"It's nice to know that we have local investors in New Mexico who are willing and wanting to invest in local journalism," said Garcia, who is also the editor/publisher of the Valencia County News-Bulletin, which is owned by the same local company as the Albuquerque Journal. "I think that's a big positive for our industry."

That's all in addition to a number of nonprofit, online-only organizations operating in the state, including Searchlight New Mexico, New Mexico In Depth and Source New Mexico, which Garcia said offer a great deal of value for New Mexicans by tackling in-depth reporting that smaller publications don't always have the resources to carry out.

"Those are great resources, and I think they help the whole state," Garcia said.

Challenges for local owners

That's not to say independent owners don't face major headwinds.

William P. Lang, owner and publisher of the Albuquerque Journal, said while he still views the publication as a "value-added local paper," the erosion of print advertising has been a blow.

"So much advertising has gone on the internet," said Lang, who also owns papers in Rio Rancho, Belen and Socorro. "So we have to have internet products for our clients, and it is a challenge to keep local advertising in our paper."

Lang said the paper, whose main customers tend to be over 50, also needs to become more relevant to a wider audience.

"They're still good, loyal customers with us," Lang said. "But ... our real challenge is to kind of move toward getting more younger people."

Big profits may not be the end-game for Martin, but she, too, said her greatest challenge is making enough money from advertising, distribution and printing to support the newsroom.

For Connor, staffing is the first and greatest hurdle.

"The biggest challenge we face is A) finding good people to hire, and B) finding almost anybody," Connor said, adding that over his nearly six-decade news career he's embraced hiring people with high potential but no experience and training them up into journalists.

New Mexico's news landscape still has plenty of gaps. Newsrooms tend to be smaller than even just a few years ago — and according to the Medill study, the state has five counties without a single local news source and 16 counties with only one.

Garcia said partnerships with universities and the New Mexico Local News Fund have helped with those challenges across the board, but she hopes independent owners continue to bear up under the burdens.

"I think it is a lot better to have local owners, just because they understand ... New Mexico — the landscape, the culture, the community," she said. "They know our needs."