Journal News Publishing Partners Proving There’s Nothing Small About Small Town Newspapers

Have you heard that newspaper publishing is a dying industry?

Jeff Fletcher and Bill Ifft say you heard wrong.

These guys are living high on a seldom publicized boom in weekly newspaper readership, cranking out more than 16,000 copies of community newspapers in four Eastern Washington counties.

They own the papers in Cheney, Davenport, Ephrata, Grand Coulee, Medical Lake and, most recently, the Spokane Valley.

In addition, presses housed inside a new $450,000 building in Cheney, and at Ephrata, print publications that they don’t own, such as AAA Bulletin, which runs 72,000 copies.

The partners’ business generates $3.5 million in annual sales. It employs 60 people. And it’s vital signs are strong.

“We didn’t set out to have a chain of papers,” says Fletcher, president of Journal News Publishing Co., the Ephrata-based parent company.

But it sort of happened over 15 years as some older publishers retired, some neophytes had to be bailed out and some entrepreneurs came looking for financial backing to operate local papers.

Fletcher, a 49-year-old Ephrata native who suffers from hay fever, has a soft spot for local newspapers: he abandoned his corporate climb at a Seattle daily in 1977 to buy his hometown weekly.

“He’s a good newspaper man, and there aren’t many left,” says Jack Hilson, the Grand Coulee Star’s founder who sold to Fletcher and his partners in 1981.

Ifft, an energetic 37-year-old family man who traded in his Jaguar for a roomy Audi, was born with ink in his veins. A photograph of his grandfather, who founded the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello, looms behind Ifft’s desk inside the Cheney Free Press building.

“They (Ifft and Fletcher) are like twins,” says Kip Graber, publisher of the Davenport Times, a Journal News paper. “They have way too much fun.”

Ifft and Fletcher got together in 1990 when Ifft left as advertising director for the Lewiston Tribune to help oversee Journal News papers in Spokane and Lincoln counties.

They are the majority owners of Journal News; the Fournier family, which publishes Seattle suburban papers, is a minority shareholder.

The men telephone each other daily to discuss business. They celebrate their birthdays the same week, they both ride motorcycles, play golf, work long hours and own Labrador retrievers.

More important, they share an altruistic desire to see community weeklies survive. On at least two occasions, they’ve fronted the money needed to help local publishers stay afloat until they could buy out the partners.

Last month, Journal News Publishing concluded such an investment in the Newport Miner when publisher Fred Willenbrock bought out the company’s interest in the paper. Next year, the partners are scheduled to sell their interest in the Star to publisher Scott Hunter, who has managed the paper for several years.

“People talk about how newspaper readership is down, and that’s true for many dailies,” says Diana Kramer, executive director of the Seattle-based Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. “But for weeklies, circulation and readership are all trending upward.”

“They (Fletcher and Ifft) are helping because they’re set up to spin people off on their own. That’s unusual.”

Willenbrock, who is this year’s association president, says that without the Journal News backing, he never could have bought the Miner. That would have left the Pend Oreille County community dependent on a weekly owned by an Idaho newspaper chain.

“They believe that individual publishers should have a vested interest in the community because if it doesn’t grow,” Willenbrock says, “the newspaper doesn’t, either.”

Fletcher and Ifft try to make that work without meddling in editorial content. At the flagship Grant County Journal in Ephrata, the paper has won the WNPA’s prestigious general excellence award three times in the past 10 years. It’s been runner-up twice.

“They’ve never stuck their nose in here editorially,” says Graber in Davenport.

The Valley News Herald will be the partners’ most visible test of their business savvy. The paper was created this summer when Fletcher and Ifft bought the fledgling Spokane Valley News and the older Spokane Valley Herald. The deal added 5,500 paid subscribers and newsstand sales to the Journal News’ total circulation.

But it’s the company’s first venture in a competitive metropolitan market. The Valley Voice, which is produced by a full-scale bureau of The Spokesman-Review, is distributed twice a week to more than 27,000 subscribers and newsstands customers.

Ifft is undaunted. He believes he can double Valley News circulation to 10,000 papers in the next few years.

“We have no aspirations to build an empire,” says Ifft, who serves as publisher of the Valley News Herald and Cheney Free Press.

“But I disagree that newspapers are dying. There’s still a need for people to know what’s going on, and a community newspaper is the best way to do that.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo