Local News: Are you in a desert or an oasis?

Vince Kern  
Welcome to another friends in wonder podcast, a place where we invite you to wander with us about meaningful topics without judgment for limits, brought to you by two lifelong friends looking for insights through a lens of how can this help and Joe Luthor, and I'm Vince Kern, and we're your hosts. Now let's wander and wander together. Hey, Joe, how you doing today?

Joe Luther  
Oh, Vince, I'm pumped up as always, how you doing?

Vince Kern  
That's good, because I'm pumped up to it. Our topic today is right up our alley. It's something we've been talking about for 40 years,

Joe Luther  
especially up your alley, because it's about the news. And that was your world for a very long,

Vince Kern  
yeah, about 30 years or so in the journalism field. And I found this great report from the University of North Carolina on vanishing newspapers influence on local news. Yep, yep. Yep. Yeah, that's it. You remember when we used to have, you know, local papers coming to our door? I think you and I used to deliver them? We did, didn't we? You know, new restaurant opens up or something's happening in the school board. Yep, exactly, you know, four or five reporters covering these things. All eyes were

Joe Luther  
on the local news.

Vince Kern  
And what do we get now?

Joe Luther  
Well, we've got a lot of national news. We've gotten a lot of internet news. And from what I think you're about to tell us, we have a dwindling landscape and local news.

Vince Kern  
I am used to saw the paper in my hand, didn't you? I did. Well, we're going to start off with some facts today. And this is from the University of North Carolina report. And it is titled, somewhere on here. You know, all good reports have a title and I don't have it on my notes, but I'll get it. Well, yeah. We'll link to it later. Okay, so since 2004, the United States has lost 1/4 or 2100 of its newspapers. This includes 70 dailies, and more than 2000 weeklies and non dailies.

Joe Luther  
My goodness, so 70 dailies? Yeah, those would all be in pretty big markets.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, those would be big markets. So that's more of a you know, we local for those local, you know, depending on your concern, local as Detroit, right. But in Detroit, you know, so you've got Royal Oak Birmingham, right, all the suburbs with right. And a lot of the newspapers used to cater specifically to those. And that's what sounds like is being lost here. These weekly. Yeah, what? Not daily,

Joe Luther  
what do you think the impact of these news deserts, as they call them? What do you think that means to us? Why is that important?

Vince Kern  
Well, it's important. And I'm going to quote our guest today, we have a guest, who has started a fabulous local news, operation and story, New York big success story, serving a community that doesn't have a local news desert because of his ventures. But we'll talk more about him later. But what I think it means, Joe, and you said this before, and we've had a lot of conversations about journalism over the years, but it's as much about what's not getting covered and what's not being said,

Joe Luther  
right, people don't know what they're not getting, right. It's one thing that news can be crafted and shaped and influenced by whatever influences that are out there, usually profit driven. But when you don't even get a story, you don't realize that you're in a news desert. And that's really what this whole idea of, of the dwindling landscape of local news is all about.

Vince Kern  
Right. And to quote that Howard referenced, the hope that I'm referencing from Howard is that without local news, democracy basically dies. Right? Well,

Joe Luther  
that I, I believe that because really, I mean, our whole Republic was founded on this grassroots kind of local first and then work your way out to the more national and well, now we're talking about global today, but But yeah, it was the founding fathers were most concerned about empowering people at the local level. The same is true about information.

Vince Kern  
Exactly. And I guess it's about that time in the podcast where I have to come clean and say, Joe, you are right. Oh, yeah. Well,

Joe Luther  
tell me more. Well,

Vince Kern  
you know, since the beginning of my when I was a pied, eager, idealistic. Yes, cub reporter who

Joe Luther  
dealt with that way events, I just like to pick out what was a write about

Vince Kern  
where you are, right? Because even before the Internet back in the early 80s, where we were sitting around talking about these things, you were very aware of the influence of corporate media and big tech.

Joe Luther  
Oh, yeah. The old follow the money idea. That's right. And so how does that play into this local news thing?

Vince Kern  
Oh, well, over the last 40 years, we've seen what corporate influence as done and in the 90s 10 years after you said it, the internet came along and brought Google and Facebook in.

Joe Luther  
Right. That's true and Google All ads have probably taken away from a lot of the local news, classifieds. I know that car companies traditionally used to advertise in the classifieds. Yeah, I mean, there were literally sections in the newspaper where you would look to find a car. Yeah. And those are all gone. Google and others are literally destroyed. So the revenues of ads have gone through, really the Google way. And then, and then there's Facebook with all their attempt at trying to control local news.

Vince Kern  
Well, everybody's a self publisher now. So. So Well, Google deals with advertising. Facebook sort of takes the content. So all those local feelgood stories, right. And this is something that, that our guest, Howard Owens deals with every day. And I am happy that he is willing to join us today. This is interesting.

Joe Luther  
This is very interesting. And I kind of agree, maybe democracy does depend on this kind of a story.

Vince Kern  
And we're gonna ask Howard about this. He's been in the journalism field for at least 30 years, he's had experience in both corporate media operations, some rather large ones, and he left to start his own business in Batavia, New York, and it may be kind of curious to people why we would interview someone from Batavia, New York. Yeah. But

Joe Luther  
it's, I mean, it's just like Main Street, USA. It's a microcosm of the rest of the country. Really?

Vince Kern  
Yeah, exactly. And it's a place that where Howard has successfully managed to bring local news to his reader. So

Joe Luther  
he's a shining example for all the rest of those news deserts out

Vince Kern  
there. Yeah. And hopefully some journalists out there may listen to this and say, hey, I can do that too.

Joe Luther  
Well, he did. So I can't wait to hear about his story. Let's see if Al

Vince Kern  
can get him on the line. Via zoom today. Okay. Oh, are you awake?

Joe Luther  
Okay, Al, cue them up.

Vince Kern  
Joining us now is Howard Owens, the owner and publisher of the Batavian in Batavia, New York. And thank you for joining us today, Howard.

Howard Owens  
Hey, Joe. Vince, great to be on with you guys.

Vince Kern  
Howard, you've got quite an illustrious background, I would say you are a entrepreneur in the local news business going back a couple of decades. I know you started your first newspaper when I think you were in fourth grade. And later on, became a reporter for several newspapers in California and started at a local website there and then became a corporate news media executive. So you've worked in a number of local and corporate organizations. Can you give us a little bit of your career background, Howard?

Howard Owens  
Sure. Well, I appreciate events, of course, you've been tied in with add it yourself. We both share a background at the Daily California nice County, which was three years of a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And the but yeah, for some reason, I've always gravitated towards news, like you mentioned fourth grade. I didn't really consider news a career though, until I was, you know, in college, and wound up getting involved with a friend owning a small weekly paper and a portion of San Diego Ocean Beach Point Loma area. You know, Carlsbad journal daily Californian where we met. And then started, went into freelance for a while and started East County online, which I like to say Nana was kind of probably the first hyperlocal news site in the nation that was 1995. And then had to make some job changes along the way and wound up in Ben. Sure. And eventually at the Ventura County star, and that started me on the executive path until I landed in New York and wound up going back to kind of my entrepreneurial roots.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, let's let's talk about the hyperlocal news startup a little bit. You mentioned that was 1995. So if anybody is looking on a timeline, the Internet was probably very nascent back then there wasn't being used for new sites tremendously. Can you sort of go back and share what the landscape of local news on the Internet was back then?

Howard Owens  
So this was shortly after, you know, mosaic had been introduced, and probably about the time Marc Andreessen and his partners were introducing Netscape. Netscape was very new at the time. It seems like the first browser I had was mosaic. And I had an opportunity man by the name of Ron James, who went on to become the, the content director for sign on San Diego, the union tributes website at one point, he was running San Diego magazine at that time, and he's told me I interviewed him for a story for San Diego Business Journal and he said, Hey, do you want to be our East County correspondent I said got a better idea. It's friend of mine on some weekly newspapers out here. Let's launch He's counting online. And he gave me free server space. And I didn't even know HTML at that point. But I just thought that was an opportunity I wanted to go after it seemed like that was the way to go at the time. From research I did at the time, there were about 100 daily newspapers with websites, to other weekly newspapers had websites. And so but we were one of the first we were doing original content online, we had free classifieds. That was before I knew about Craigslist, we had, you know, kind of drilled down on what kind of a lot of hyperlocal stuff we tried to get sort of a community bulletin board going at the time before, there's really software to really run something like that. So that's what that's why like, you know, looking back on it, I didn't position it that way for a number of years, but I realized we were probably like, the first hyperlocal news site in the nation at that point.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. And so we've been talking about local news and the lack of it these days, and how important that is, to democracy in general. But, you know, what, how would you define you've been in this space now for at least no 13 years with the Batavian. But longer than that with the East County venture? Well, how do you define local news and talk a little bit about why it's so important? And I actually stole a quote from you just now, in a previous interview you did with editor and publisher, and you said, local news, the future of democracy depends on local news. So Can you expound on that a little bit?

Howard Owens  
It's interesting, I heard, I was on a conference call with Chuck Schumer not too far back. And he's talking about local news. And he said, local news is the DNA of local communities. And I remember using that at a conference, I spoke out with the American Press Institute back in probably 2004 2005. That's kind of how he's viewed, you know, news is what binds a community together. You know, I can get into a lot of, you know, stats about how strong communities are interconnected, and they have strong business communities. And that leads to higher graduation rates, lower infant mortality rates, lower teen pregnancy rates, I mean, there's all kinds of positive outcomes when you have strong local communities. So that's one reason I'm really passionate about it. The but for me is, you know, local news is what happens. You know, however you defined what your coverage area is. For us, it's a county, for some people, it's a neighborhood, you know, but what happens in that in in that locale, and that's what she should focus on. That's what she should care on, that should be care about that should be what your brand is, you don't want people thinking of you as anything other than really passionate about the area that you're covering?

Vince Kern  
And how does accountability play into that? With with agencies and, and things of local government?

Joe Luther  
That kind of thing? Yeah.

Howard Owens  
Well, you know, I think that there's two ways of looking at it. You know, a lot of people decry the lack of resources to do investigative reporting. And gee, wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who was always, you know, fulfilling that watchdog role, but that doesn't mean that we don't do that occasionally, you know, do enterprise reporting, if not investigative reporting, you know, I have gotten an award along those lines in the process of doing the Batavian. But I think just showing up at government meetings is one of the first most important functions and we deal all the time with local government agencies that don't get as much coverage. And they're nervous and sometimes reluctant or a little difficult to deal with when it comes to you know, releasing public information or being as completely transparent as they should be, because they don't deal with reporters enough. When government agencies deal with reporters all the time, especially when there's it's a competitive situation, like we have with the Batavia, Daily News and say, Batavia city council, they're much more transparent because they've got two reporters hounding them all the time. And so they know they're going to get asked about it. They're known, they're going to be held accountable. And I think that's kind of the first level the most important bit level about community reporting. Local journalism is just showing up.

Joe Luther  
Yeah. And you know, I think, obviously, the easy one to to describe is local government, but there's also local business, right? Sometimes businesses have to be held accountable as well. Both environmentally are what they're doing with your employees, or how they're just behaving in general in the local landscape and the law lack of local news really takes takes the spotlight off of that, doesn't it?

Howard Owens  
I mean, I guess, you know, I think you're more familiar with kind of a big metropolitan area. It's kind of a mixed bag at the small hyperlocal area level, because you're dealing with really a lot of small businesses. And you know, they're not the ones out causing generally big environmental damage, or the ones that are going to be caught up in big, you know, say sexual harassment scandals or anything not that that doesn't happen to the small business. But does it rise to kind of newsworthiness when you're talking about a really small business? I will say, however, there have been have, you know, I've done some stories like a story I recall, recently, two stories involving one of our larger agricultural producers at a local environmentalist had raised an issue about some discharges into a nearby creek, which, you know, he had documentation, we covered that. And then at the start of COVID, same business, there's some questions about how they were handling their COVID cases. And we covered that. So there's still you know, those things do come up. And I think if you didn't have local reporting as this existing, then those things would be much public would be much less aware of those situations.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, I mean, isn't it? Isn't it true that a lot of the bigger media organizations get their local stories from local news sites who cover them? And then they say, Oh, well, this is, this is a big enough story for us to cover. So we're gonna go out and cover it.

Howard Owens  
Well, my friend Dylan Smith down in Tucson, sandaled complains all the time about stories, he's broken, that the New York Times is picked up and act lewd, like, nobody had it before them, you know, stand on the shoulders of his reporting without acknowledging it. And, you know, we don't remember we used to deal with this. At the daily Californian weed cover story, two or three weeks later, you know, and this was, I'm going to share with you a reporter frustration, then one of us would cover a story two or three weeks later, the LA Times in San Diego Union Tribune would back then it was the Union or the tribune would pick up the story, you know, after we've already covered it, and the editor would come around saying how come we don't have this? We beat them on this story, ya

Vince Kern  
know, would have been me holding my hand up. So, you know, in the landscape of the media, over the last 15 or 20 years, though it you know, the statistics show that in, for instance, 2100. Newspapers have gone away in the last 15 years, and a lot of those were smaller weeklies or community papers, because of the economics of it, in some sense. And then the the other economic of big corporations, you know, buying some of the smaller local news sites, and then sort of cookie cutter in the operations. So have you seen that in, you know, in your what do you how do you have you seen the landscape of local news changing since you started the Batavian?

Howard Owens  
Well, anything that's happened since I started the Batavian is just a continuation of trends that started really in the 70s. As family dynasties died off, and the heirs didn't want the responsibility of a newspaper, you know, families would sell to Frank, Annette, you know, or, you know, some of them went to a well run family chains like Scripps or McClatchy, which had both disappeared in the time that I've had the Batavian you know, that there was that consolidation going on, you had a tremendous change in, you know, this doesn't get talked about enough. But Walmart had a tremendous impact on the newspaper business because they had a tremendous impact on Main Street America. And Walmart does not advertise in newspapers traditionally hasn't. And but those businesses on Main Street did, and that forced newspapers to make a switch away from relying so much on retail advertising to classifieds, and that's when you get into verticals, you know, auto and real estate and everything with with much higher dollar values and that became a major source of revenue for newspapers. And that's pretty much what the internet destroyed.

Joe Luther  
Yeah, that's for sure. You know, I can I ask a question, though, both you guys are media experts, or you've been in media for a long time, but you there was a phrase used earlier that I think bears a little clarification. There's local news. And then there's hyper local news. It's somebody say, hyper local news is there, is there something like what you're doing is that smaller than, like, the Detroit area needs local news too, but it's a bigger metropolitan area.

Howard Owens  
A decade ago, 15 years ago, hyper local was the big buzz term. It is not, it was always kind of somewhat mocked and ridiculed. A lot of people and it's kind of fallen out of favor. Now. It's not using much people just talk about local news. But you know, I used it in context of that, you know, just to kind of clarify what we're doing in these county online. And what we do now is just that there is a laser focus on local that exist when you are, quote, unquote, hyperlocal. That doesn't, that's a little bit different from the old local newspaper days, because the former and I was debating with somebody about this online the other day, you know, the former model before the internet, the former model of local newspaper, and this applied to the daily Californian, to some extent, was you carried Associated Press, you know, my job, when I was wire editor, Vince will remember, that's when he first came on, I was a wire editor was to put together page three, and it was all that wire stories. In a hyperlocal context, you don't do that. And one of the things I was arguing about is, you know, newspapers today still do that, and shouldn't even if you're in print, everybody has access, just a click away to all the world's news, you need to be laser focused on your local community that needs to be your brand. I had every newspaper I've worked at, you know, in my career, since the internet came along, I fired Associated Press, we stopped using Associated Press online.

Joe Luther  
But with the advent of the Internet, everything has really kind of the pendulum has swung the other way, right. And that's really why we have these these news deserts, is because people are becoming more satisfied with the idea of this national or international news, and maybe don't know what they're missing.

Howard Owens  
I think it's more complex than that. I mean, you know, Vince may remember this book. But back in the late 90s, Philip Meyer wrote a book called The Vanishing newspaper. And he talked about corporate ownership harvesting, which is they're just taking profits out. And then at the time, he wrote that that was really prophetic, because that really wasn't happening. But that's what we see now with like Alden, and to some extent, you know, there's a couple other chains out there that are investor owned, venture, you know, not venture capital, equity capital own. Yeah. And they're interested in in, you know, making sure that they're always profitable profits come before every other business consideration. And so that's where you get the reduction in staff and you get the closure of unprofitable or underperforming newspapers. And that can particularly hit small communities hard that are already struggling, because, you know, they've been shrinking, you know, rural populations have been shrinking across the country for decades. So that is kind of what's been going on in creating, you know, that's I'd say, that's the primary factor in creating these news deserts. One of the interesting things, I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus but a journalism professor here in New York, who is well known for his internet punditry 20 years ago or so, argued he and I argued all the time about the value and future of local news, because he kind of believed along these lines, that is, as you suggested, that people just want, we're proud of a global community now, they're not really interested in what's going on in their local community. And I'm like, No, you know, I didn't believe that for one minute. I didn't have a lot of evidence, I'd say the Batavian has given me the evidence. I mean, you look at how popular we are. How the praise I get around the community, people are really hungry to know what's going on in their local community. They want to hear the scanner calls, they want to see the police beat stuff, but they also want to see the new Rest, rest. new restaurant openings are one of the most popular things we do. I mean, they want that entire package of what's going on in my community today, this week, if not this minute. There's a real hungry for hunger for it. And I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs potential out entrepreneurs out there who are missing out on the opportunity to create that kind of value.

Vince Kern  
How has big tech tried to fill that gap? And do you think it has successfully and you know, more specifically, you open up a phone Facebook feed and and you know you're getting I'll put news in quotes here, but you're getting information from a whole bunch of different sources. Some of its some of its vetted, some of its not vetted. You know, I, to me, I don't think it's sufficient, but how is how has social media impacted local news, in your opinion in the last 10 1015 years?

Howard Owens  
Okay. I'll address as there's probably two questions embedded there. But I'll let's talk about social media for so when I started social media, the Facebook was really brand new. And when I started the Batavian, rather than Facebook was really brand new. Right at the point that the Batavian launched, you still had to be a college student to get to get a Facebook account. And it opened up in the first few months of the Batavian. It'd be another two or three years before they had this concept of pages and started to have news on Facebook. So Facebook was not, I looked back, you know how you get your memories on Facebook, I looked at stuff back back at what I posted, you know, in 2009 2010, before pages opened up, and it shows me how much Facebook has changed because back then it was really more like, it was more like the parody, but a lot of people do about social media. Here's what I'm having for dinner tonight. Right? So Facebook was not a factor, I was able to grow my business, through interaction in the local community. New publishers today tend to be much more dependent on Facebook, I have a certain degree of dependence on Facebook. But for the most part, my audience is pretty baked in the you know, we've established a brand, we've established a habit before Facebook came along. So new publishers, I think have a much bigger challenge. But Facebook, I really kind of want to drill down on this, if I can, you know, Facebook is the largest looming threat to local news, there is the end, it doesn't get talked about enough. The you know, there's a bill through before Congress now to make Google and Facebook pay for local news. And to me, they're only getting half right. Google is not a threat. Google is not a problem for local news at any level. And I think publishers that blame Google really don't understand their own business or the internet. But Facebook is is sort of you know, and when people talk about this bill, when there's commentary about the bill, the focus is on Google, Google is not a threat. Facebook is death by 1000 cuts. They rely on our content. You know, although they're talking about de emphasizing it now, but they put they use our content a lot. They use news content a lot to drive interactions, then they create these groups that take away from the community conversation. They take away classifieds, they're going after our local advertising business. Now, we haven't lost much of any revenue to Facebook, but you know, it creates turbulence in the marketplace for for a competitor like, like Facebook to come along.

Joe Luther  
Are you talking about when you say, taking your revenues? Are you talking about Facebook marketplace? In the ads that they

Howard Owens  
will? Well, Facebook marketplace is really named after more kind of the classified thing. Yeah, that's fine and classified revenue. And that's a problem. But Facebook groups around virtual garage sales is like a bigger problem than marketplace marketplace really doesn't have that much traction. So, but they they are marketing to, you know, local businesses, promote your, you know, do a post and promote it. You know, and it's not expensive. So it hasn't hurt us, you know, too much. But you know, there are a couple of businesses that rely on that exclusively that might other local,

Joe Luther  
local vape shops and stuff like that. Right. I see that. And

Howard Owens  
then the other thing that's been happening that's really been frustrating is we have non government agencies and government agencies that oftentimes now, instead of sending us a press release, we'll just put something up on Facebook and think that's good enough. And if we say anything about it, well, it was on Facebook. Well, you know, I don't see everything that everybody posts on Facebook. Nobody does. And but they'll rely on Facebook, or they'll just publish their own news to Facebook. We've had a problem with the local school district events, you know, last spring that normally we would be invited to cover that I've traditionally been invited to cover. We were not invited to cover it. They covered it themselves on Facebook. And when I complained about it, they said, we made a decision. We didn't want local media there. And I could never get an explicit explanation why, and why is it okay to put those pictures on Facebook? Where they can be distributed globally without your control? You know, you're not if they're if it's a safety issue. I mean, that certainly is can't be it. I mean, why do they want to put it on Facebook? So there's this growing awareness. That's a concern for me, among government agencies in particular, that we can just route around the local media, and we really don't need them. Our county government just hired a new manager of social media, who is going to, you know, cover themselves. One at another school district just has a new manager starting today of social media, you're seeing that more and more, I'm hoping to find a way that we can work with operatively. Because at least like the school district, that out in the ROI that has this new social media manager, I talked to Superman superintendent this morning, he gets it, he knows a post on our site is going to reach a heck of a lot more people than anything on Facebook. So he wants to be sure we're cooperating with each other. But not everybody gets that. And that's so all those factors together as my say Facebook's Like a death of 1000 cuts is just eating away at us. And I worry about what the long term impact because it's, you know, the proverbial frog, to mix metaphors reveal frog boiling and hot water.

Vince Kern  
So there, do you think it's an or maybe it's a combination of both? Do you think it's a resources issue? Or do you? Do you? Is it possible that they just don't want to answer questions from journalists any any longer? You know, you say controlling the news? I mean, that that's a big, that's a big scary walrus looking, you know, citizens in the face right there.

Howard Owens  
Right. And I don't think it's anything knowing these I mean, these are people in my community, I know them. I don't think there's any nefarious intent there. It's an excitement about being able to do it themselves. It's a, hey, we can't you know, school districts in New York. I don't know how it is, you know, for the Detroit area, but well, you know, per pupil spending in New York is like $3,000, a year more than any other school, school state in the union. I mean, the amount of money, there's just no barrier to spending money in school, at schools in New York. And there's just no resistance. Nobody fights back against school spending at any level on anything. And so they can go out and do this. And it's fun and exciting. And they feel like they're doing a service for the community. They feel like they're doing the right thing, because all the parents can see Johnny's picture on Facebook.

Joe Luther  
But there's no analysis, nobody's nobody's giving any editorial. Angles angle to it,

Howard Owens  
I guess. Right. I don't think there's any consideration that this happens often enough. And if they were, if they are successful, so far, they haven't been. But if they are successful at taking eyeballs away from us, and then advertisers start to realize that, then, you know, they're jeopardizing our business model. And then they're not going to have that independent coverage, which I think every one of these school superintendents save a couple that I've had conflicts with, but most of them would say that they welcome us showing up their meetings that you know, it helps create trust in what they're doing. When journalist shows up and covers them. It doesn't have to be negative coverage, just coverage saying, here's what's going on at the governmental level.

Joe Luther  
They're not trying to control the narrative you're thinking but in effect, that's what they're doing.

Vince Kern  
Right. Yeah, that's the result. So we've talked a lot about the local news landscape, but let's talk a little bit more about the Batavian. So, give us the basic you know, the basic outlay of the of the Batavian who you cover, what you cover how you cover it, and you know a little bit about Batavia, New York for some of the people that may be listening from other places. I do know Batavia was the home for that big movie. They filmed there. What was it? trains, planes and automobiles?

Howard Owens  
Yeah, there was some scenes filmed in Genesee County with John Candy and Steve Martin. Yes. And still talked about quite a bit. Also, there were some scenes filmed here for the natural you know, the Robert Redford deal. I

Joe Luther  
know that built it and they will come that's what you did. You had quite the success during it's okay to brag when you talk about the Batavian because it really is a success story.

Howard Owens  
That well I'm proud of it. I'm proud of you know, what I've accomplished in this community. You know, I'm I'm from San Diego. I moved here specifically because of the Davion and, you know, one of the local business owners has commented and complimented me on how quickly I kind of became embedded in the community. You know, like a lot of small towns, Batavia can be resistant to newcomers. And I was accepted pretty quickly and have been accepted. And it's, you know, always gratifying to go to an event, like I went to event last night and everybody as I walk in is like, Hey, how are you know, and, and, you know, that's, you know, that's nice. The county has 57,000 people in it, that's our coverage area, we do 12 to 14,000 unique visitors on a weekday, the vast majority of them are right here from Genesee County, or we get a lot of commuters that live and work in Buffalo, and they visit the site frequently. I mean, work in Buffalo, but live here are Roger Rochester, but live here. And we get a lot of traffic during the day during daytime hours from those cities. So, you know, the traffic has been pretty phenomenal for the last decade at least. And you know, we've always had a reputation of everybody I'm using, quote, air quotes, even though we're talking, but everybody reads the Batavian. And, you know, we have typically 140 150 advertisers on our homepage at any one time. I don't think that you're going to find many newspapers, even four or five times our size, or I've never seen the newspaper, website anywhere in the country that has as many advertisers as we do. And there may be some newspapers with more revenue, because they're bigger markets, they can charge more. But you know, 250 $270,000 in revenue a year of pure not up sold pure play internet revenue. I just don't think there are many newspaper websites that can match that.

Joe Luther  
So what's the secret sauce? You know, obviously, you're very likable guy, you, you were brought into that you came in were welcomed into the community? Obviously, that's a good part of it, right? But do you have to dig constantly? Do you have to put in 80 hours a week? Like, what is it that you think, obviously, you're providing good content, and that helps the advertisers want to, you know, advertise with you? And obviously, you get great readership. But what do you think is the secret sauce for you versus some of these other places where it hasn't been thought of as a good opportunity?

Howard Owens  
Well, I'll try to unpack that a little bit. First of all, I don't think I'm anything special, as far as likable or charismatic, or any of that kind of stuff. I have no special powers. But I think, you know, just the ability to go in and talk to a local, I sold ads for the site in the beginning, and there's the ability to go in and be relatable to another small business owner, something anybody can do. You don't have to be terribly articulate to do that. Then. So, you know, I don't think there's anything particular about me that contributes to the success. It is a lot of hard work. And I've been willing to do that. Not everybody's willing to do that. But, again, that's not you know, you don't need anything special in your DNA to be able to do that. And then I think there are, there's a formula that certainly at this level, and probably slightly bigger, is replicable. And that is, you know, our motto, especially early on is to answer the question every minute of every day, what's going on in my community. And to be honest, I don't think we do that now, as well as we used to for a variety of reasons. But I think, at least at the start, that's really key. You know, one of the things I discovered, it'd be a long story, I'll just give you a kind of a short version of it is that people don't click on links. It's kind of misunderstood a lot about the internet that people really don't like to click on the links that go to a webpage with specific intention. That's why we put all the stories on the homepage. And we don't have you don't have to click a link to read a story. You can. It's just all right there. That's why we put all the ads on the homepage, you can see everybody that's advertising our community, it becomes like the local business directory, because it's all right, their readers and advertisers love that readers and advertisers love the ease of use of our site. The emphasis on breaking news, listening to the scanner and getting out to accidents and fires and covering them quickly. is important. Although we like little Community News, just kind of what's going on now. Who are the interesting people new businesses opening you know, having that kind of complete aspect of it is another key ingredient. You put all that together. Like and like I told you or Earlier, people really want to know what's going on the community hyper are, excuse me, local news sells, it's an easy sell, selling to local advertisers, retail. Display ads is an easy sell. A lot of people are resistant to these ideas in the larger news, local news universe, newspaper, universal newspaper people a lot of times even like fighting these ideas, but it's really basic and really easy. And and I think the success of the Batavian and some other similar ventures across the country, you know, prove it.

Vince Kern  
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about other sites like the Batavian. How much? How many, you know, how many are out there? And, you know, you mentioned all of the things that have to get covered. And I know you post 4, 5, 6, 7 Different things a day. So what kind of resources does it take? I know you're, you know, you're a small business, you're one guy, you have a, I don't know how many employees you have. But what's your operation look like? And what else is out there? And why aren't there more sites like the Batavian? That's a bunch of questions all at once.

Howard Owens  
So there are roughly 400, local, independent online, buying online news sites in the nation. Now, to my understanding, I the degree to which some are success, not obviously, not all are successful, not all follow our business model. Some rely on event revenue, some rely on membership, or subscription revenue. Not those that do advertising, sometimes rely more on programmatic ads, or, you know, network advertising than local advertising. So there's a bunch of different models out there. I got a friend down in San Angelo, who does a great job. He's making a lot of money doing events and videos. I mean, that's his, he also sells ads. He's got ads. And but he does both programmatic and local ads. So it's really kind of a mix. He's been very successful. Riverhead local here in New York. And then just to the north of us, Orleans, county, Orleans hub, you know, very similar business models, to ours, ARL Arlington, now down in Arlington, Virginia, again, kind of a mix of of advertising revenue going on there. So you know, I'm far from unique, but it also is a lot of work. You know, when I started, this was pretty much just me. My late wife, Billy had not joined the business for the first several months. So I was writing all the stories after I took it over gatehouses, we haven't really gotten into that. But once it was my business, I was writing all the stories, I was selling all the ads, and did that for months and building all the ads in Photoshop. And we didn't have an answer for I had to physically put them on the site. So you know, it's a lot of work. Steve Jobs, great video on YouTube about the secret of success is you know, it's a lot of work. And you have to be insane to do it. And I think that's true. No, remains a lot of work. It's been harder, frankly, for the last several months. Even though I do have more resources, I got a full time online, our news, local news editor Joanne Beck, who used to be my competitor, and is now part of the team and does a fantastic job. She's a very well respected in the community as a journalist. And then Lisa ACE has been with me now for more than a decade handling all the advertising stuff, which is a big, you know, relief off my plate after don't do that. And she's been a perfect fit, because she really gets what we're about. And our customers love her. She has great people skills and gets along very well with all of our advertisers. So then I have a whole host of freelancers, that one person that will write occasional news stories for us a couple of people that write features once in a while. And then I have an army of freelance photographers that I call on don't frankly, get as much out of them as I'd like. Because they have other lives that keep them very busy. But it's nice to have those resources.

Vince Kern  
So it's, it's, it's a pretty good size organization, when you look at all of the things that you just mentioned, in a sense. I mean, it's, it's not just you and somebody else, you've got a few people out there and you've got your secret sauce and Lisa and her relationships and and so you've developed quite an organization. What would you say to somebody who say was a journalist who who had a passion for local news? How would you how would you direct them? What would you say is the most important thing to develop something along the local news sight.

Howard Owens  
First of all, you know, I have continual frustration. Every time there's been a wave of wave of layoffs, I usually have at least one tweet where I say, if you're out of work, look around, you start a local news site. You know, I think I, why more journalists don't believe they can do this? I don't know you will. One of the big hesitancies is a lot of times as well, I don't know how to sell ads. No, you do. You sell yourself every day as a reporter, trying to get people to talk to you and give you information, you know, you know how to be persuasive. It's going and talking to a local businessman and saying, give me some money is no different. So, you know, I think any journalist could could develop the business sense to be able to do this. So I'm always kind of frustrated that more don't do it. You know, my encouragement is look around your community, what how do you define your community? What is it, and then if you have three or 400, at a minimum, locally owned businesses in your community, you have a viable business model, you know, set up a WordPress site and start selling ads,

Vince Kern  
which is a little bit easier to do these days, you still have a confluence of skills that you need, I mean, you talk about photography, and computers and technology, but those are all things that a person can can learn. And the tools are out there. Now,

Howard Owens  
you can learn on the fly, you know, I've won some awards for my photography, I was not the photographer necessarily, when I started the Batavian, I purposely set out to make myself a good photographer. And that was just one of the things I wanted, wanted to learn. And it's, you know, talking about things that I think have helped our with our audience growth is having good photography, people appreciate it. But I just mentioned that to say, any of these skills, there are a whole bunch of skills that you need for this job, yes, but you can learn them on the fly, you're building a business, you're not going to have a huge audience right at the beginning, it gives you some ramp up, if you can find a way. So for us, I needed to sell 40 ads in three months to have a bare minimum of revenue, to keep the lights on, keep food on the table, keep a roof over our heads. And I went out and did that. And you know, if you can afford that kind of ramp up have any kind of resource to make it happen. I think this doing this as in the grasp of a lot of people who don't realize that it is within their grasp.

Joe Luther  
And it's so fundamentally important and fundamentally important to the consumer, as well. So I think there should be an equal, maybe kind of call to action for the consumer to support this kind of thing as well.

Howard Owens  
Yeah, I do want to i Two, part of me wants to add a little cautionary tale. A little caution to it is one of the things that I think has been difficult is my age going into this, which was late 40s, approaching 50. Well, now it's that way, I had to be older than that. So it was 14 years ago. And I'm 61 now. So as I was, you know, mid 40s. Keeping up the pace that I'm at is a lot harder at my age now. So you know, you're when you're older, you're just you know, your bones ache, you have injuries, you have health issues, and that certainly taken a toll. You know, probably the ideal age to do this is when you have some experience in late 20s, early 30s, Young 40s Because it's going to take some time to build a business where you have help and I don't want to kid anybody. It's hard. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of stress, it's a lot of worry, go watch that Steve Jobs video, you know, you kind of have to be insane to do it. But it's incredibly fulfilling incredibly. It's a lot of fun. If you love journalism, you're gonna love doing this. You're your own boss, you make your own photo assignments, you make your own story assignments, what, you know, come on, Vince, you know how much I wanted to do that back at the California and oftentimes you were so I was always kind of pigheaded in that way. And now, you know, nobody controls what I do you want to be an independent journalist appear on this. I want that independent so why aren't more people out there doing

Joe Luther  
it? I feel most journalists want to make most journalists want to make a difference. And this is a way to make a difference to

Vince Kern  
you. So

Howard Owens  
the difference you make, how it's to me it's an incredibly, insanely great thing to be able to do.

Vince Kern  
Well, you've had a long and illustrious career and you've certainly contributed an enormous amount to the field of journalism and and I and I say that in in having watched you for gosh 30 Some years through through your career, and it is mission critical and and I just want to ask you, as we close this down to put your or visionary hat on? And what do you think 1015 20 years from now? The local news, local news landscape looks like.

Howard Owens  
I've always been pretty optimistic. You know, one of the things I used to talk about quite a bit when people criticize what I was doing and say the low cost of our advertising, low cost, those that have subscriptions, low cost to them. You know, as you look at the early Penny press people, Horace Greeley, little later, Hearst, and Pulitzer. You know, they started with small operations, we, there's a tendency to think that every news organization was came to life fully staffed with 1500 400 people. Now, most of these news operations started really small, you know, William White in in, in Kansas, you know, it was just him and a couple of people early on, and eventually that paper grew into a staff of, you know, I think 40 or 50, people all told. So, the employer is that now they're a lot smaller. But you know, it takes time to build, you know, I tend to be an mostly an optimist that we will adjust and local news is incredibly important, and there'll be entrepreneurs willing to take it on and there'll be people wanting to support it. I'm more a little more pessimistic these days, because you go back to what I said about Facebook, unless Facebook is reined in, in some way. I think it's an existential threat to local news.

Joe Luther  
Well, all right. Well,

Vince Kern  
on that note,

Howard Owens  
sorry, to be so cheery.

Vince Kern  
Know It, it's, you know, it's it's very, it's very scary to think about because we're used to having local news. I mean, all of us in our 60s, probably had an abundance of local print newspapers. There was plenty of local news. I know when I was cutting my teeth as a reporter, I was going to four or five local city government meetings every week. It was just it was it was commonplace. And it's it's not commonplace now. And so, you know, it is I think the future of democracy depends on both citizens consumption of local news and in businesses, getting it out there. So you know,

Howard Owens  
you know Vinci you think back back our time together, I covered the Mesa Mike Drummond covered Elcom that I filled in for a few times with them alcohol. And in particular, if you went to a meeting there, there is at least two other reporters there every time you went, I wouldn't be. I would bet that there are now meetings and alcohol and that don't get covered at all. Yeah.

Vince Kern  
Right. Right.

Joe Luther  
Well, that's why we're glad to have shined a light on this issue today. So thanks for your

Vince Kern  
time. Yeah, we want to thank you once again, for your time, Howard, we hope that you'd be willing to join us in the future, if possible for more enlightening discussions in our friends in wonder podcast. And may you and your dog have a wonderful evening.

Howard Owens  
Great. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. And good luck with your thanks, again,

Joe Luther  
appreciate. Well, that interview sure didn't disappoint. That's for

Vince Kern  
sure. No, Howard is, you know, he's not only a visionary, but he's somebody who adapted to the landscape of what was happening in the news business. And I have to say, one of the reasons that the news business is in such trouble, or local newspapers, or whatever you want to call it is because it is a dying industry. Yeah. I mean, they didn't adapt. They didn't adapt when, when people started taking away the classifieds, they didn't adapt when the business model started to change, because you know, internet, right. And, you know, I have to say this, too. There's so many journalists who are purists that I've known in my last 30 years in the business, and they're very reluctant to change from the same pure standards I had when I was telling you that corporate interests would never never dissolve.

Joe Luther  
Well, I think that's probably true of all humans, but you're saying that it might be even more so. And

Vince Kern  
it could be but you know what I mean, he's a perfect

Joe Luther  
example of, of how to adapt

Vince Kern  
Exactly. If you're a journalist, and you're looking for a mission to uphold journalism in its purest form. You should take a look at what Howard's doing it to protect

Joe Luther  
our democracy depends on and he proved, I specifically asked him, there's no secret sauce. You just got to be passionate about it. Right. And I'm sure there's a lot of passionate journalists out there who are in news deserts. That could take a great example from Howard in our interview today,

Vince Kern  
and I think Howard also threw out a lot of things that readers should become better aware of as well?

Joe Luther  
Yeah, I think the whole overall idea is people need to be aware where they're getting their information from and what they want to support, so that it's there for years to come.

Vince Kern  
Yeah. And if they're not getting the information that they need, they need to start demanding it. Yeah,

Joe Luther  
exactly. And supporting it. So yeah, that was good. Vince. I really liked it a lot. I think there was a lot there for everybody

Vince Kern  
on word we go wandering friends in wonder. All right.

Joe Luther  
I like it. Have a great day, Joe, you too. Well, so ends another episode of Friends in wonder. We really want to thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen to more episodes, provide feedback, questions, or even suggest topics you'd like us to wonder about in future episodes. Be sure to check us out at friendsinwonder.com. We'd also be grateful if you'd subscribe, like or share this podcast. Until next time, I'm Joe. And I'm Ben and we're friends in wonder