Major declines in print circulation are happening everywhere. In 1997, total circulation for all U.S. daily newspapers was 56.7 million. At the end of 2016, it was 34.6 million, a drop of 22.1 million (39 percent).

To understand how any papers have managed to stay afloat even though readers have left in droves, you have to look at more numbers.

“One way papers are surviving has been to double prices over that same span. I bet they’ve (Maine papers) doubled their prices in 10 years, and if so, they’ve come up with the same amount of revenues so that it’s sustainable,” Doctor said. “The question becomes, though, what are the limits on how much you can price up? Most publishers are finding that they are hitting a wall in terms of pricing.”

The Portland Press Herald and Bangor Daily News have, indeed, more than doubled their newsstand (or single-copy) prices in 10 years.

The newsstand price of the Portland Press Herald (now $1.80) has gone up by 140 percent since 2007, when it cost 75 cents. The current Telegram newsstand price ($2.80) is 60 percent higher than 10 years ago ($1.75). Likewise, the BDN newstand price is 108 percent higher than a decade ago (60 cents to $1.25); its Saturday edition (it doesn’t publish Sundays) price has increased by a third, from $1.50 to $2 over 10 years.

Both papers have had less luck with home subscription rates as they carefully juggle defecting subscribers and the need to raise prices.

The average home delivery rate for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram is $6.50 a week (for all seven days, plus the electronic edition and website access). That’s up by $2.43 over the 2007 price of $4.07 a week.

The BDN has raised prices at a slower rate, from $3.95 a week for home delivery in 2007 to $5.59 a week now (for all six days, plus website access).

What’s stemming the tide?

Despite the rather dismal state of the newspaper industry, and the stark circulation numbers, when asked about the general health of Brower’s newspaper properties, CEO DeSisto said, “all of our properties can stand on their own.”

How is this possible?

It’s possible, Doctor explained, because of the world we’re living in, where most newspapers now strive to stop revenue slides and aim for the “unsexy digit:” zero, as he called it in a 2013 still-relevant Nieman Lab column.

“Zero is good,” he said. “The higher performers are employing strategies focused on beefing up digital subscriptions, and emphasizing new revenue streams. And if you execute those well, you get to flat – which is pretty much the best you can do in these times. If you can do that and operate smartly, it can work.”

“Flat is the new up,” said Brower, agreeing that flat is a realistic expectation in current conditions. “Our revenue is flat because of raising prices and the other measures we’re taking.”

“Digital is the place of growth, as well as diversifying,” he said, echoing what Doctor and other analysts are recommending. “There’s no way to paint a rosy picture, but it’s not a completely dark picture. There are lots of things that we can do to make the glass half full.”

DeSisto, CEO of all Brower media properties except The Free Press and Courier Publications, said her team is aggressively marketing paid digital subscriptions across Brower’s properties, and it’s paying off, with digital-only subscriptions pacing ahead of projections.

“We are seeing continued growth in digital subscriptions – a monthly average of 43 percent (year-over-year growth) for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel so far this year,” reported Stefanie Manning, group vice president of Consumer Marketing for MaineToday Media and Sun Media Group.

Digital-only subscriptions currently account for only 16 percent of circulation numbers for Brower’s papers, she said.

“The exciting part of digital is that you can go after a wider audience,” added Brower. “You can hit the snowbirds in winter and give them online access to their paper. We have to figure out ways to take advantage of this kind of thing. There are a lot of opportunities in the digital world.”

According to DeSisto, things have been looking up this year.

“Many of our papers are pacing ahead of last year in terms of advertising and circulation revenue,” she said. “We are focused on revenue growth with everything from sponsored content to our event series.”

We are focused on revenue growth with everything from sponsored content to our event series.” – MaineToday Media CEO Lisa DeSisto

At the Bangor Daily News – Maine’s only daily that Brower does not own – Benoit said new revenue-generating ideas always are top of mind, by necessity.

“Everyone in newspapers who is in management spends a lot of his or her time thinking about new sources of revenue and how to make existing sources work better,” said Benoit, noting that in the declining circulation equation, corresponding savings on trucking, paper, ink and other costs help offset some of the revenue losses. “Obviously, things are a lot different than they were 20 years ago, but this isn’t a new problem. We’ve been living in this space for a long time. We’ve been working on this for 10 years.”

The BDN is trying many of the same steps as other papers. It was the last major paper in Maine to add paid digital subscriptions with a website paywall, which it did just last November for desktop and laptop users. Benoit expects a mobile version to be rolled out in next couple of months.

The paper hadn’t felt a need to charge for website access until recently because it expanded its distribution and coverage six or seven years ago, Benoit explained. “It was doing fairly well, but when there was a leveling off of traffic, we decided to do this.”

Like many others around the country, his paper has recently created a marketing agency to counteract ongoing circulation losses, too.

Innovation for Maine’s Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander has included establishing a website production and maintenance service within the papers about eight years ago, said Alan Baker, publisher of both papers. Printing other small papers in the region and jobs for corporate clients has generated revenue in recent years as well.

“We’re living in a time when we’re all reinventing ourselves to do the job of reporting local news,” said Baker, 88, who started his newspaper career in 1960 with The Philadelphia Inquirer.

At that time, when “we started every Sunday with 80 full pages of advertising,” he couldn’t envision a world where retail advertising would wind up so devastated because of people getting their news from so many – and often unreliable – sources beyond newspapers.

DeSisto said her papers are always looking for efficiencies. A key benefit to common ownership of six dailies and many other publications, she said, is providing centralized services, which cuts costs and ultimately will better serve readers.

“These services include digital development and digital ad serving. It would be very difficult for some of the smaller properties to support those services on their own. Once we are on the same systems, we’ll be able to have a common customer-service experience and optimize our home delivery routes. Before we can get the full benefit of cross-selling and make it easy for advertisers to buy across properties, we need all properties to work from the same advertising platform. This work is underway.

“This stuff doesn’t happen overnight. It’s all in process, but the end state is very promising,” said DeSisto, who also is encouraged by the status of management’s relationship these days with Local 128, the News Guild of Maine, which represents workers in marketing, circulation, advertising and the newsrooms of the Portland and Waterville dailies.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, you have a unionized workforce.’ But that’s not an impediment to our success and work here,” she said.

Guild President Jim Patrick, social media editor for the Press Herald, said the relationship “is better than it’s been in many years,” particularly after the chaos of the Richard Connor regime (CEO from 2009 to 2011 accused of misappropriating more than $500,000) and the financially challenged Seattle Times, which sold the papers to Connor’s consortium in 2009 after 11 years of ownership.

“We feel these people (DeSisto and Brower) want what’s best for the employees and they’re the right people for the job,” Patrick said. “It’s definitely guarded optimism when we’re seeing cost-cutting but not filling jobs” and with buyout offers happening. “It’s not a great situation, but they’re at least keeping us in the loop, and that’s a huge difference compared to past administrations.”

Believing in the power of print

Brower calls the combination of efforts being undertaken in Maine “baby steps” that collectively sustain papers.

But for how long? And are such efforts really enough for Maine newspapers to do more than just tread water?

“We didn’t go into the year with a negative budget, and we didn’t have an expansion of profit,” he said. “We can’t go on like that forever, but you can still create synergies, and do this and do that before having to cut a lot of bodies to keep a viable product. If you’re losing 2 to 4 percent a year, can you continue to sustain losses year after year? No. Eventually it gets to a point of no return. But right now, we’re not there. It’s not jumping-off-the-ship numbers yet.”

I don’t believe print is dying. Obviously, if I didn’t think the industry would last that long I wouldn’t be investing. I believe people like reading the tactile paper. Yes, we have to concentrate on digital, but a lot of people still want to have a printed version.” – Reade Brower

If the forecast were so horrific, Brower said he wouldn’t be investing in new presses to handle commercial clients, which now include magazines and advertisers who left print and have returned to it. He sees potential in commercial printing – enough to have seven-year debt service attached to his most recent printing investment.

“I don’t believe print is dying. Obviously, if I didn’t think the industry would last that long I wouldn’t be investing. I believe people like reading the tactile paper,” he said. “Yes, we have to concentrate on digital, but a lot of people still want to have a printed version. If coffee were to go out of vogue, and everybody wanted to drink tea, it wouldn’t mean coffee would be discontinued. You have to give people what they want.

“And people still want to sit down and have a cup of coffee and read their paper and digest the news. Digest not ingest. You’re ingesting, flipping through your phone, and you wind up at a cat video before you know it. Newspapers are still the best place to go when you want to digest the news. And as long as we are a coffee shop, I want to serve coffee.”

Brower contends print outshines digital in some regards.

“Print is still a great way to brand a product,” he said, pointing to a simple print campaign for a restaurant in his area in The Free Press and Courier papers that highlighted a buy-one-get-one-half-off deal as an example.

“Sales were 50 percent ahead of last year, we noticed many new faces and the credit cards showed people traveling from 20 miles away to come to the tavern. Interestingly enough, we did the same offer on our website (Village Soup, which has more volume of readership than the papers) and had very light action from that – print outperformed it about 25 to 1. We got many more coupons cut out from the papers than people printing them from the website and bringing them in. So even though the audience for print was lower, they saw the ad, they cut out the ad, they acted on the ad. As long as that happens, advertisers will continue to find a place in their budget for print.”

Brower also noted that “the demographics of print readers is very strong; disposable income and an older readership is all good when it comes to spending money.”

Man without a grand plan

Brower said he is unfazed by naysayers who doubt or wonder about his ability to sustain operations and make his ownership arrangement and properties successful.

“It’s their job to speculate, but they don’t know,” he said. “I’m the closest to it who could know, and I think it’s a viable model. I believe there is a niche for mainstream media to perform a service as an information gatherer and watchdog. There should be a business model that follows that is sustainable. If you fill a niche, you will make money. That’s been the history I’ve seen over time.”

As he often does when asked about specific plans, Brower shrugs.

“I don’t have a grand plan,” he said. “I don’t have a plan for the next five minutes. I don’t have any magic bullets. You just have to go back to basics and hard work, provide good reporting and get ad sales people out there on the streets to sell.”

Doctor said many eyes will be watching Brower’s “fascinating example” play out.

“All of the negatives about Brower seem to be potential dangers,” he said. “I understand in the abstract about the risks connected to this single ownership. But it’s a risk worth taking.”

Adds Bangor Daily News owner Rick Warren, who has his paper printed via Brower’s organization, “while it may seem troubling to have so much of Maine’s print media concentrated in one entity, on balance, I would say it has not been a bad thing. That could change should he decide to sell his holdings to an out-of-state entity.”

While it may seem troubling to have so much of Maine’s print media concentrated in one entity, on balance, I would say it has not been a bad thing. That could change should he decide to sell his holdings to an out-of-state entity.” – Bangor Daily News owner Rick Warren

The only big concern for Doctor has nothing to do with Brower’s approach.

“What if he gets hit by a truck? What happens then?”

Brower concedes that’s a reasonable concern that he’s working to address.

“That’s part of the puzzle I’m trying to put together,” he said. “I don’t have a succession plan right now, but I’m working on a longer-term solution. It’s not a family business that our kids will be taking over – it’s been my wife and me. So if a bus were to hit me tomorrow, hopefully I have people behind me that would work in my best interests and for my family’s best interests and the papers’ best interests.”

“It’s an important model that can work if he can sustain it,” Doctor said. “And it would be nice to see it work.”

But … does it really matter?

If owners and managers of newspapers stopped scrambling to generate new revenue, and newspapers actually did phase out, would it matter?

The consensus among analysts and others is that newspapers still matter a lot – to our democracy and society, and digital sources aren’t an adequate replacement system.

“Without newspapers, most communities would not get a regular diet of local news about the local schools and local governments. And that’s just the beginning,” said McBride of Poynter. “Television and radio newsrooms and even local online startups often approach news as a niche product for certain audiences. Daily newspapers look at news as a service to the entire community.”

At stake, said Socolow, the UMaine professor on the MPA board, is important reporting like Matthew Stone’s 2017 investigation for the Bangor Daily News into the millions that Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services used unlawfully.

That type of work “requires the support of independent editors and a publisher unafraid to reveal ineffectual and possibly illegal governmental behavior. That independence requires economic viability, and that’s why the economic issues in the media today have ramifications for effective civic governance and an informed citizenry,” Socolow said.

Losing newspapers would mean a “huge loss of accountability journalism,” Kennedy agreed. “Newspapers are also able to effect change because they are reaching a broader swath of the public than, say, a small nonprofit journalism project online, which may be ignored.”

“We’d be in trouble,” said Brower about the potential of losing newspapers. “It’d bring us closer to other countries that don’t have the First Amendment protections we have” and it would mean a loss of key things newspapers do: “most importantly serving as a watchdog, and also keeping communities connected and informed about what’s going on, and providing an open forum for discussion.

“I also think that print cuts through the clutter that all the other media has. With print, you take your time. It doesn’t disappear if you slap a fly off your wrist or get up for a cup a coffee. We’d miss that.”