PULP FRICTION.

• Author: Clark, Paul
• Position: Newspapers compete in Madison County, NC

Healthy competition proves fatal to an old mountain newspaper.

Fred Hughes locked his sights on a Madison County institution soon after he moved to neighboring Yancey County in the early '90s. "A 100-year-old newspaper has accumulated an enormous amount of baggage," he says. "It isn't hard to find people who feel the community would be better off if they had a newspaper with a different approach."

He knew he was the man to lead the opposition. He'd done this kind of thing before. In 1971, he created The Independent Post in Live Oak, Fla., to go head-to-head with the Suwannee Democrat, a century-old newspaper that "wasn't doing its job for the same reason that most 100-year-old papers fail their readers," Hughes says. "They get set in their ways, and they get in a rut."

Hughes ended up selling the Post in 1981. It was later resold to the Democrat. But he had made the Post a force the older paper had to reckon with, and he came out of it with enough money to retire, though he chose to become a management consultant for small and medium-sized papers. Not a bad ending for a business started with a $100 loan and kept fluid by giving discounts to advertisers who paid cash.

As he surveyed the competitive landscape of his new home, Hughes -- a curt 56-year-old who, despite his occupation, only grudgingly gives interviews and refuses to have his picture taken -- was sure The News-Record, a weekly in Madison County, was vulnerable. Not only did it fit his stereotype of a self-satisfied small-town paper, it had alienated a growing segment of the population. The paper's editor had shown rabid support for the Democrats who had run the county almost continuously since 1954. But in recent years, as more outsiders discovered it, Madison had become more Republican. It even elected an all-Republican board of commissioners in 1994.

What Hughes couldn't know when he began talking about starting a rival paper was who his eventual competitor would be. The News-Record had changed owners three times in the past 30 years and would change hands again shortly after he launched his weekly Sentinel tabloid in March 1999. Though he set his strategy to compete with, and conquer, The News-Record of old, his eventual competitors, newcomers like himself, recognized the Sentinel's threat and responded with more aggressive coverage of local news. "One of the things we heard about the Sentinel was they showed up at a lot of stuff," says Keith King, who with his wife, Louise Spieler, bought The News-Record four months after the Sentinel's launch. "There was a sense that they were energetically interested in the community and that The News-Record seemed kind of lazy or complacent. We definitely as new owners didn't want that."

The News-Record's circulation increased 9% to 3,812 within three months after Spieler and King bought it. Spieler, now 41, was the publisher. King, now 40, was the editor. During their tenure, The News-Record became profitable. "The joke is, you never make money on a newspaper until you sell it," King says. "But definitely, the value was on the upswing." Yet by last September, despite another 5% gain in circulation and seemingly every advantage an incumbent could expect, The News-Record was dead -- sold to Hughes and merged with the Sentinel. The county's new newspaper monopoly got a clumsy new name: The News-Record and Sentinel.

Only an extreme optimist would believe Madison County, with a population of 19,000, could support two newspapers for long. There just aren't enough readers or advertisers.

The sparse population is...