REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Adding Up the Numbers

Of the 1,700 delegates to the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. convention in Century City, nobody is paying closer attention than Sam Marocco to discussions about improving newspaper circulation and readership.

Marocco is publisher of the Sun City (Ariz.) Daily News Sun. For most of the year, the circulation at his 13-year-old paper hovers around 21,000. But during the summer, it plummets to 16,000.

That’s because the warmth that draws thousands of retirees to Sun City in the winter becomes a 115-degree blast furnace that sends them packing in the summer.

“We still publish the paper and sell advertising, but I don’t know of any other paper with such peaks and valleys in circulation,” Marocco shrugged. “I’d like to talk to fellow publishers about sagging circulation.”

He said he understands how his readers feel, however. “I take my vacation in August and go to Upstate New York,” he said.

When she heard newspaper publishers were coming to the Century Plaza Hotel for their convention, hotel newsstand cashier Julie Intramanee ordered extra copies of local papers and made special arrangements to stock out-of-town papers from Chicago, San Diego, Seattle and Washington.

“Usually, we sell out of the local papers by 9 in the morning,” Intramanee said.

Not Monday, however. “We haven’t sold a one,” she moaned at midday. “They’re giving away free papers to everyone at the convention. Nobody’s buying ours.”

Freebies on racks at the hotel included the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the New York Times, the National, Investor’s Daily, the San Bernardino Sun, the Palm Springs Desert Sun and USA Today.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley welcomed publishers to the convention by announcing that drinking water will be served only on request during the session’s banquets and luncheons because the city is in the fourth year of a drought.

Delegates were still digesting that news when publishers association Chairman William H. Cowles III told the crowd at a kickoff breakfast that one of the group’s goals for the next decade is development of “dry” newsprint production plants near cities such as Los Angeles.

Cowles, publisher of the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, said such plants will not require the huge amounts of water that conventional paper mills use. Construction of the new mills near urban areas will make newspaper recycling easier, he said.

Student journalists from Los Angeles high schools and USC are producing a daily newspaper to chronicle convention events for publishers. The fact that they are rubbing elbows with some of the nation’s most powerful media moguls wasn’t lost on the young volunteers.

“I thought about bringing along a bunch of resumes, but then I figured I wouldn’t have much time to schmooze,” said Bob Elston, 21, a USC junior. Elston’s assignment was to write a story about a convention speech made by Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.).

Elston said he wasn’t worried about what the publishers might think of his story. “I won’t be around when they read it,” he said. “I’ve got a full day of classes Tuesday.”