Paper Truce : Publisher Studies Sale to Competing Weekly He Founded 11 Years Ago

Eleven years ago, Daniel J. Schmidt, then a 23-year-old journalism student, borrowed $2,000 from his parents to start a weekly newspaper, the Moorpark News in Moorpark.

After a year, it was clear the paper was struggling. “I didn’t know anything about business,” Schmidt recalled. So he sold the paper for $10,500, agreed not to compete against the News for five years, and went elsewhere to work as a reporter.

Five years and two weeks later, Schmidt returned to Moorpark to start a weekly newspaper, the Moorpark Mirror, to try to sink the News. The News “had eroded in quality,” he said. “I knew Moorpark needed another newspaper.”

This time Schmidt had more staying power. His Mirror managed to survive for five years by often taking community leaders to task--sometimes excessively, his critics say--and by hustling for advertising. The News “palled around with all the community big shots,” he said. “They did all the PR kinds of things, all the fluff kinds of stories, and left the real meat for me, and I went after it with a vengeance.”

But the Mirror did not sink the News, which has deeper pockets than Schmidt. The News is jointly owned by two newspaper groups, Harris Enterprises of Hutchinson, Kan., and John P. Scripps Newspapers of San Diego, a unit of E.W. Scripps Co. And the Mirror and News say that as they struggled against each other, neither was making big profits.

Now, however, Schmidt and the News are about to make peace. Last week, Schmidt tentatively agreed to sell the Mirror to the News for an undisclosed price.

The sale “gives me an opportunity to collect in one lump sum the spoils of six years of hard work, and gives me the resources and time to launch my next project,” perhaps another newspaper, Schmidt said in an interview.

The News claims that about 1,500 people buy its paper, and that another 1,000 are given away each week to various neighborhoods to spur additional subscriptions. The Mirror, meanwhile, claims a paid circulation of 500, but it gives out about 3,700 free issues. The paper is owned by Schmidt alone.

Debra W. Ryono, editor and publisher of the News, said her paper’s decision to buy out Schmidt was an option that the News had considered several times in the past.

The News-Mirror fight was unusual in that Schmidt was, in effect, competing against his past. But it also was unusual in that Moorpark, a town of about 30,000 just north of Thousand Oaks in Ventura County, had managed to support two independent weekly papers at a time when even big cities are increasingly unable to generate enough advertising and readership to host two or more hometown publications.

The number of U.S. cities with two or more daily newspapers under separate ownership currently totals 43, or only 3% of the 1,526 total dailies, according to the American Newspaper Publishers Assn., a trade group in Washington.

Other Competition

Nonetheless, the News and the Mirror still had to fight for advertising dollars with several daily newspapers that also are sold in Moorpark, including The Enterprise in Simi Valley, the News Chronicle in Thousand Oaks and the Ventura County Star-Free Press. (Harris and Scripps also own The Enterprise.)

Schmidt agreed to the sale even though it appeared Moorpark’s surging growth might generate enough new business, and therefore advertising, to support both the News and the Mirror.

Moorpark, long known as an agricultural hamlet, has been caught up in Los Angeles’ progress. Acres of new houses are being built and, although Moorpark has a slow-growth plan to limit the expansion, the town’s population has nearly doubled in the last three years.

Yet although Schmidt is preparing to sell the Mirror, it’s unclear whether the Mirror will go out of business.

Schmidt claimed he will “not sell the Mirror if the Mirror ceased to exist after the sale,” and that the Mirror’s future is a detail yet to be worked out before the sale can proceed. “I didn’t work six years just to be bought off and chased out of town,” he said.

Nothing Final

The News’ Ryono said “this is all open for discussion, nothing is definite yet.” But, indicating that the News expects only one paper to survive, she said a merged “Moorpark News Mirror” might be the end result.

Ryono said last week that it was not immediately known if Schmidt would continue with the Mirror or the News after the sale. If so, he would be joining a newspaper he has heavily criticized. A few days before the merger plans were announced, Schmidt said the News had “ignored controversial subjects” in its news coverage. The Mirror challenged Moorpark’s power structure, Schmidt said, while the News has “cozied up to it.”

Ryono denied Schmidt’s characterization of her paper, and said “people sometimes tend to think that Dan takes things maybe a little bit out of context, or blows them up a little bit more than what they should be.” Besides, she said, “he doesn’t carry as much news” as her paper.

The News views itself as a traditional, family-oriented local newspaper that covers not only crime, environmental problems and other pressing concerns, but also reports on piano recitals or pinning ceremonies at the Cub Scouts. “Everybody likes to see their name in the newspaper,” Ryono said.

Schmidt, meanwhile, likes challenging the actions of the City Council and other community leaders, and seems to relish the animosity his stories generate. “Dan’s outlook has always been more of a muckraker at City Hall; he likes to stir things up,” Ryono said.

Legal Notices

Schmidt also believes he scored a coup a few weeks ago when he won the contract to print the city’s legal notices--the announcements of public hearings and so forth that the city is required to publish--by underbidding the News, which had the contract in recent years. Schmidt asked for 50 cents per line of type from the city; the News sought 53 cents.

It also prompted him to call the Mirror “Moorpark’s Newspaper of Record.” The contract “was more than just a moral victory, it was a marketing victory as well, because for five years they had it, and now they’ve lost it,” Schmidt said of the News.

Ryono downplayed Schmidt’s victory. “I would have liked to have kept them,” she said of the notices. “I don’t know how many people get a paper, though, just because of the city legals running in it.”

In fact, lots of Moorpark residents aren’t buying either paper, given the number of free issues each delivers. But the freebies have a purpose: They help the News and Mirror persuade advertisers that their papers are reaching a wide audience, and it’s advertising that pays the bulk of a newspaper’s bills, not paid subscriptions.

Advertising Competition

But having two weeklies in town forces many advertisers to make a choice. Simi Valley Bank, for instance, advertises regularly in The Enterprise of Simi Valley, which also sells in Moorpark. So rather than advertise in the News, which is owned by the same people, it runs half-page ads in the Mirror for $234 a week.

“We’re trying to cover our bases,” said Barbara Williamson, a vice president of the bank.

Now the advertisers might have one fewer choice if the News and the Mirror merge. But Schmidt insists there will be no merger unless the Mirror continues to be published by its proposed new owner.

He said that if the sale is “simply a way for Goliath to say to David, ‘We’re going to get rid of you and go back to business as usual,’ I’m prepared to stick around another six years.”

But publisher Ryono said that if the deal goes through to buy Schmidt’s paper, it’ll probably have the usual clause preventing him from starting another paper in town.