NAPLES, Fla. —  Have newspapers cut too far? Jim Moroney thinks so. The Dallas Morning News, where he’s publisher and CEO, has started growing its corps of journalists and its news space again, after significant cuts, to maintain its news and content franchise.

         Moroney told about 150 newspaper publishers, owners and executives that the primary “sustainable competitive advantage” that newspapers have in their local markets is their content. And “our profitability is still tied up with the print edition.” So despite tremendous cost pressures and advertising declines, the Dallas paper has started rebuilding after making major cuts.

         “I think we’ve downsized too much. [We have to] stop downsizing our newsrooms, stop downsizing the number of pages in the paper,” Moroney said during a panel at the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association “news industry summit” this week.

         Moroney talked about research the News did to find out what it could charge for the print edition. While many publishers have been reducing their print subscription costs, the Dallas paper has pushed its monthly subscription rate for print up to $30, and it expects to continue to raise the price.

         In five years, in Moroney’s vision, a newspaper won’t own any presses or trucks, and it won’t have substantial production capabilities. He envisions a pure play focused on two things – content production and distribution, and advertising sales and distribution.

         We think Moroney’s extremely smart. So we’ll be watching over the next few years to see how he moves toward those goals.

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         More notes and quotes from the SNPA conference:

 

        Jason Taylor, president and GM of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, talked about changes he’s made to the real estate offerings at the newspaper, including upgrades to its open-house guide and adding a new day for open houses; the addition of an “exquisite homes” ads section, and improvements to its homefinder print edition.

        “One of my biggest frustrations: When I moved to Chattanooga, I could not use our newspaper to buy a house. And that freaked me out,” he said.

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         Terry Heaton of Audience Research & Development, a television- and Web strategy group based in Dallas, told about Ben Boles of Jerry Damson Automotive, a Huntsville, Ala., dealership. It now operates six Web sites, 350 microsites, four YouTube channels, four EBay stores, has a strong presence on Facebook, and uses ad-server tools to serve its own ads anywhere on the Web.

         “He … can track everything that he does. And believe me, he knows everything that works and that doesn’t. He’s so far ahead of you in understanding the Web.

         “You may not have a Ben Boles in your market [now], but I promise you, you will.”

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          Owen Van Essen, the premier newspaper broker in the United States, teamed with his partner Phil Murray to review valuation of newspaper companies these days – a topic of great importance to SNPA members, many of whom are family owners or owners of small groups.

          “There is a market [for newspaper sales],” Van Essen said. “That might come as a surprise to some of you. Our firm alone has completed 11 separate transactions in 2009, and we believe the market will improve when revenue starts to stabilize and some credit starts to make its way back into the marketplace.”

         Historically, newspaper buyers have looked at past performance to value newspapers, he said. But now many buyers are looking forward, because newspapers are no longer generating consistent year-over-year growth. When setting a newspaper valuation, “it’s more accurate to look at multiples of what the buyer expects to generate in EBITDA in the first 12 months of ownership.”

         (Last spring, Van Esen told a different newspaper conference that the value of some newspaper companies had reached zero.)

         Murray said times appear to be improving at newspapers, albeit slowly.

         “We think there’s plenty of evidence that the ad market has reached bottom. It’s not getting any worse and it’s getting better,” he said. “Competition [for newspapers] is back; it’s here to stay. Profits are probably going to be lower [than they were during the ‘golden era' of newspapering in the 1950s through the 1980s], but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any profits.”

         “Newspapers still have great strengths, they have inherent value. [But there’s not one thing that’s going to take us back to the golden era.”

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          Attendance at the conference was strong — more than 180 people registered. That’s up from last year, a significant accomplishment. It’s way down from the heydays of the conference, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when 700 to 800 people attended SNPA annual conventions. But the days of one company sending 20 or 30 people to a conference are gone forever.

          The SNPA, Suburban Newspapers of America and International Newsmedia Marketing Association are (at least tentatively) planning to coordinate a single “key executives” conference for the spring in March, rather than holding competing conferences. If they can pull it off, it’ll be a strong conference and an example of cooperation that’s worth emulating.

          A special shout-out to Parade magazine, which sponsored a dinner barbecue on the beach. Perfect weather, perfect sunset, great experience. Sure beat the standard dinner-buffet-in-a-banquet-room. A wonderful reminder of why a conference like this was held in Naples.