The challenges and realities facing local newspapers today

This is the space for frank discussions, right? Let’s have one.

At the beginning of this year, three weekly newspapers, stalwarts of their respective communities — The Record Review, The Rivertowns Enterprise and The Scarsdale Inquirer — folded after their publisher was unable to make their continued existence financially feasible.

The reasons for why that was are too voluminous to discuss here.

The Scarsdale Inquirer printed continuously for more than 100 years. Its closing left one of the more affluent suburbs in the country without a local news source. And the same went for the Hudson villages covered by the Rivertowns Enterprise, and Bedford and Pound Ridge, the communities The Record Review covered.

In the months since the three papers folded, people in all the communities they served have rallied to varying degrees to replace them with new publications, at least one of which hopes to have a print product to go along with the digital arm of the new endeavor.

The Riverdale Press, of course, wishes all of those new projects well.

And speaking of The Press…

Earlier this year, there was a change at the editor position here at the paper. Shortly after that, the Press’ longest tenured reporter — here one year, which is a good run in the current weekly newspaper business — departed as well. Both of those positions have been filled, but it’s probably time to talk about a few realities surrounding the paper you’re currently holding, or the website you’re currently reading.

Every time you see a position turn over at a paper like The Press, it means a reset of some degree. New journalists have to learn how to do the job — Spoiler alert: That’s not taught in J-school — and old journalists have to adjust to a new landscape.

There are always new players to learn and new rules to navigate, even if the game is largely the same.

And the game is always largely the same.

But that doesn’t ultimately make things any easier for anyone coming into a new job at an unfamiliar paper. There’s always a learning curve. The trick is to try to find people for whom that curve will trend upward as much and as quickly as possible.

Doing so is often like catching lightning in a bottle, though less so than it used to be as more local and regional newspapers — like The Enterprise, The Inquirer and The Record Review — vanish, sometimes literally overnight.

Before you panic, or become even mildly perturbed, The Press isn’t going anywhere.

But you’ve probably noticed the paper is thinner than it used to be, perhaps more so than it was even a few years ago, and that’s what we need to talk about.

On the editorial side, this is a four-person operation. Of that number, two of us have been on the job here for less than six months, two of us have been in the business for less than a year, and one of us is part-time.

The advertising department is two people.

Everyone here is interested in making The Riverdale Press as robust, vibrant and essential as it can possibly be, and as close to those things as the paper was when two generations of the Stein family owned, ran and loved it.

But there’s a cycle, perhaps one might suggest a vicious one, at play here.

Although things like events and paid services have come into vogue in our business — and can be successful moneymakers — advertising sales is still the lifeblood of a paper like The Press. More ad sales mean more revenue, which, in the best of worlds, means more editorial staff.

But current ad sales also determine the number of pages in the paper. So, fewer ad sales means shorter papers and less editorial content generated by fewer people.

The great irony of the newspaper business is not everyone comes to the paper for the ads, but the ads are what support the creation of the news, features, and everything else contained in the paper.

The greater Riverdale area is host to diverse neighborhoods, each with its own identity, feel and energy. And within each of those areas is a varied array of local businesses — some still quite new, some upcoming — with a great deal to offer their neighbors as well other parts of greater Riverdale.

And The Press covers them all. Maybe something to think about.

If this has all felt like some veiled sales pitch, maybe it was. But what it really is is honesty about the local newspaper business, how it works, and what it would take to get back to where we all — staff and readership alike — would like The Press to be.

We’re here. You’re there. And this is where we all meet, as one community, every week.

Maybe something to think about.