What Are They Thinking? Austin Beutner’s California Turnaround Plan
He’s only been a publisher for nine months, but now Austin Beutner will command southern California’s top two dailies, after Tribune Publishing finalized a purchase price of $85 million for the biggest newspaper company to its south, UT San Diego, last week (“Newsonomics: Tribune Publishing Wraps Its Arms Around San Diego — and All of Southern California”).
As that deal moves to closing within a month, Beutner emerges as a regional news leader to be watched nationally. He will head up one of the largest news companies, serving a market area of almost 14 million people. Perhaps, most importantly, he offers a fresher strategic view of the role and the business of one-time monopoly print newspaper companies as they fully embrace the digital future.
I talked with Austin Beutner Monday, after he had completed his performance of many media rounds in San Diego Friday, saying the right things. “Most people won’t notice any changes, aside from improved coverage, Beutner said,” reported the UT on Beutner’s initial talk to the company.
Of course, lots of things will change. They should and they have to. And they have begun to at The Los Angeles Times.
First published at Capital New York
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In nine months, he’s made key hires, finding like-minded people outside and inside the newspaper industry, to lead the operation. He’s launched a test newsletter, launched events and reached out to the many communities within greater L.A. His strategy will take three to five years to play out, and he frankly acknowledges that it’s unknowable which business models of what size will emerge from his community-engaging strategy.
New Tribune Publishing C.E.O. Jack Griffin named Beutner publisher of the Times in August, right after TPUB split off from the Tribune (Broadcasting) mothership. A co-founder of Evercore Partners and longtime investment banker, 55-year-old Beutner certainly was an unconventional choice for the job. Newspapering is an in-bred profession in the U.S. and worldwide. The industry has long promoted from within, even in recent years as old business models have worn thin, and fresh thinking has been badly needed.
Our conversation focused on strategy, and on Beutner’s now-leading advocacy of community building as a fundamental business model of the new digital–newsprint–events news economy. It’s a strategy that demands listening to, as most newspaper companies just get smaller and more and more distant from the communities they serve.
“We have to own the conversation about where we live, our neighborhood, physical or digital, our community and how that community connects with other communities and the state, the nation and the world. The conversation starts at home. The foundation piece is where we work and live.”
That seems like an elementary point, but one that’s been diminished as newspapers have cut back their newsroom staffs by a third over the last eight years. Newspapers have “drifted away” from that local touch, says Beutner.
He makes the point that even global news needs to be related to readers’ own local experience. He talks of a lattice of news, a noteworthy concept that will demand smarter tech to fully take advantage of news companies’ potential power to connect the news dots. “Take [Times reporter] Julie Makinen’s stories on air quality in Beijing, and China’s role in what the world’s environment will be like over the next decade or two, you can’t overstate that. She did a powerful story…. and there’s a natural set of connections to Los Angeles. We lived those same issues a generation ago. Some of the things we made progress on in Los Angeles are relevant to the Chinese and their leadership …. That’s a global story, but at its roots, it’s a very local story.”
Austin Beutner’s Three Turnaround Principles
Beutner defines the three major points of his now-expanded strategy:
· Journalism: For Beutner, the unique power of local journalists to provide news and context—at scale—serves as the Times’, and now UT’s, core differentiation.
· Convening, community: Beutner’s vision of his company reaches to “more than text on a page.” The Times has moved profoundly into its communities, testing events, meet-ups, chats, book clubs and more.
· Ownership or access to massive distribution: Though print circulation has diminished, digital reach means the Times reaches more audiences than ever before. Further, because of its remaining power, it can strike deals with other distributors. Beutner points to other power players, like universities, who also create great “content,” but have little distribution experience and underdeveloped digital networks.
Just as Buzzfeed is newly playing with the power of Facebook, the Times just produced a special Mayweather/Paquiao fight package for Flipboard, based on in-the-know staff reporting, gaining a large audience.
Most interesting, and complex, is the convening function, getting beyond that one-way text, print or digital.
Beutner has launched a “Publishers Book Club,” called Reading Los Angeles. The first book up: Ghettoside by Times staff writer Jill Leovy, which Beutner says both connects the Times to readers and also connects them to the issues of the day in Ferguson and Baltimore. Next up, several books on water, given California’s drought. The aim is to beyond simplistic “news you can use.” “We are going to do more than tell you if it’s yellow, let it mellow,” says Beutner.
The Times hired Jose Antonio Vargas, who outed himself as an undocumented American at The Washington Post, to lead a project called “Emerging Us.” In Los Angeles, we have lived with that for a generation. We are the most diverse big city in this country. We have 20 or so groups for which we’re the largest center outside of their home country living here, there’s 200 languages and dialects spoken. We’re the natural place to carry that conversation.”
At best, Beutner’s three points become a new virtuous circle of regional publishing value. Engagement is key, but well-paid, high-quality journalism remains the underlying mechanism.
“It’s one thing to have the conversation,” he says. “It’s another thing to better inform the conversation. We think that’s part of our role.”
How does this thinking lead to business success?
The best model – so far – is the Times’ first significant email newsletter product, Essential California. 80,000 subscribers have signed up for the free daily briefing. It’s part of the new wave of two-way, niche-product thinking I wrote about in February (“Newsonomics: Mixing Old and News”), as the old “we publish one product, take-it-or-leave it” era ends.
Essential California now includes sponsored content, and opens the door to making money from the Times’ digital subs, from events and from the data collected about very specific “communities of interest.” Beutner is pleased with Essential California. Look for as many as 20 of these niche newsletters to launch, if the model shows continued promise, on topics as diverse as Hollywood, the Dodgers and “Emerging Us.” Some will play in San Diego as well, taking advantage of the scale enabled by the UT buy. Consequently, the new combined Times–UT effort overall will be called the California News Group
It’s all a big beginning effort.
“We are not going to risk our brand, but we will take business-model risk. All of these start with pennies, nickels and dimes but some of them will grow, if we give them enough runway. And if we have invested enough in content and understanding the tools and technologies one can use and in the community side of things, hopefully the business grows. We believe in the strategy, but the jump from here to there is a big one.”
How Will L.A. “Community” Play in San Diego?
First reaction to the Times moving its reduced newspaper forces to the south included in a little bit of an expected nativist, perhaps-tongue-partly-in-cheek reaction. That’s fair. San Diego is the 17th biggest metro area in the country, and has never liked being considered L.A.’s little brother. Local control, indeed, can be meaningful, of course, depending on who is holding the reins.
San Diego has never had great wagon masters. The Copley family owned the paper for decades, since buying the morning Union and evening Tribune in 1928. Many good journalists worked in its newsroom, but overall it never won lasting national distinction, though it has won four Pulitzers over the years. (Its new operator, the L.A. Times, has won 43.) Even within California, the Times, the Mercury News and the Sacramento Bee all surpassed it in durable editorial quality over the decades.
If editorially underdistinguished, The Copleys ran a highly profitable enterprise, as I outline in the accompanying piece, “Billion-dollar UT sold for less than a dime on the dollar.”
For years, the reliably, old-school Republican paper played well to part of San Diego, its more established population, many with ties to the area’s strong military presence. Herb Klein, a Richard Nixon aide, served a long career, including years as editor of the U-T, both before and after of the Nixon presidency.
It’s been six years since the Copleys sold, and more than half that time, developer Doug Manchester has owned it. The paper’s direction has grown more stridently political, and conservative.
Now, Austin Beutner inherits that history, a unique mix of San Diego civic values and a conservative bent that cheers part of the community and disenfranchises other large parts of it.
The challenge and the opportunity: making community building work for a much larger part of the increasingly diverse San Diego community—without imposing L.A. values and views. One first step: the likely re-renaming of the paper, back to its iconic San Diego Union-Tribune, and away from UT San Diego, which sounded like a distant branch of the University of Texas. Of course, the paper will keep its own newsroom, though expect a lot of integration, over time, with L.A. Times coverage and content management systems.
The strategy makes elementary sense, and we can all hope it succeeds.
It does, though, face two familiar opponents: Time and money. Print advertising continues to go off the cliff. With a more than 5 percent decline in advertising for the first quarter, Tribune Publishing reported net income of $3 million, down 75 percent from a not-great $12 million a year ago. That three million dollars in profits from the Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and five other metro papers.
The kind of community-based turnaround Beutner outlines will take time, and it’s an open question how much of that a public company like Tribune Publishing can offer. One possibility I’ve already raised (Capital: “Media Notebook: California scheming”) is a Beutner-led buyout of the new, expanded Southern California operations. But that’s down the road.
In the short-term, Beutner says the San Diego acquisition is a financial plus. “It gives us runway,” he says, again using the same term Jeff Bezos first used as he answered a Washington Post newsroom question, after the announcement of his Post acquisition. In other words, the purchase is accretive, intended to better the earnings of the Times, and TPUB, given intended cost efficiencies to be wrung out of the combining of operations.
Sources tell me the UT’s EBITDA amount to about $16 to $19 million a year, with TPUB’s $85 million purchase price working at a multiple of four or five, given the complexity of growing pension obligations it inherits. So Beutner and Griffin get some runway, given both UT’s profitability, with less competition than the Times finds in its own market, and from cost consolidation. At first blush, investors have agreed, pushing the stock price up, though it’s still down 30 percent or more from its initial offering.
How much consolidation? In which business areas?
Beutner, of course, won’t say. The deal won’t close for another several weeks, and he neither needs to invite trouble from the mercurial UT seller Doug Manchester nor raise understandable concerns from the UT’s workforce.
I asked Beutner whether there was a kind of collegiality among the private owners – Jeff Bezos, John Henry and Glen Taylor – who have lately entered the business and espoused similar thoughts on community and product reinvestment.
He provided a sideways answer, which in itself is a rebuke to newspaper management as usual.
“One of the things the newspaper industry has suffered from [is] a series of one-year plans, and that’s flawed. We should be talking about as an industry where our future lies five or 10 years down the road.”
