The Anemic Boca Raton News   

Cutbacks, circulation declines plague the Florida daily.

T HE BOCA RATON NEWS HAS has been bounced from owner to owner like a beach ball for the last few decades. Now the small South Florida daily appears to be at another critical juncture in its 46-year history.
The trend at the News is reduction: In mid-March, the ax fell for a second time in a year, sending dazed staffers to their desks to pack up before the morning news meeting. Casualties of the cutback--estimates are between 18 and 22 people--included an editorial page editor, his assistant, a copy editor and employees in circulation and advertising. Combined with layoffs last year and voluntary resignations, the total staff is down 55 people to 85, staffers say. Since he purchased the paper two years ago, Publisher Michael Martin has eliminated a features section in the Sunday edition and the USA Weekend magazine, and shrunk the broadsheet into a tabloid. The daily paper lost two of its four sections. In March 2000, daily circulation was 16,288, according to the last Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers available. Back in 1990, it was 38,000.
Sandy Wesley, a 28-year employee who lost her job as editorial page assistant/writer, says cuts last year didn't touch the newsroom, but they sparked an uneasiness among survivors. Still, she thought the paper would shut down before any more jobs were lost.
"We assumed the paper would close its doors because it was looking so thin and our expenses were so high, and people I had known for years who stuck with us through thick and thin were finally fed up and were not renewing their subscriptions," says Wesley, who remembers the Boca Raton News when it was a weekly in 1963.
Wesley and others laid off have been with the paper through myriad owners--including Knight Newspapers, Knight Ridder and the Birmingham, Alabama-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., which picked up the News in 1997--and their metamorphoses and experiments. In a well-publicized move, Knight Ridder made an unsuccessful push to capture younger, upscale readers in the early '90s, featuring stories without jumps, a summary of the main articles on page one and a calendar of events.
Martin bought the Boca Raton News from CNHI, where he had worked with his brother Ralph, the company's former CEO. The publisher apparently has a long-range plan to save the News, but he's not saying what that is. He did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
Just before the March melee that ex-staffer Wesley calls "Purge Friday," Martin received an offer to buy the paper from Palm Beach County real estate developer Frank McKinney. McKinney says it wasn't rejected, but Martin told Editor & Publisher he isn't selling, or at least not a majority interest in the paper.
Insiders say he did not want to lose control of the News, a condition of McKinney's offer.
McKinney, 37, made his money building $20 million oceanfront homes. Since January, he's penned a weekly column for the News on real estate and entrepreneurship that one staff writer brushed off as self-serving.
But he at least is still getting paid by the News.
Jeff Perlman, the paper's vice president of development, broke the bad news to Wesley and her colleague, C. Randall Murray, on the morning of March 16.
Murray, an editorial page editor for 11 years, says Perlman told him cutbacks had to be made.
"He also said 'no' to my request for severance. I was there for 11 years, and I have no severance," says Murray, 56. Perlman could not be reached.
Whether the recent round of cutbacks will result in a more financially robust paper remains to be seen, but the road is long, for sure. The News' anemia is evident in its Web site, which ironically pronounces the Boca Raton News the leader in local news online. A note dispiritedly informs visitors that during site renovation, "we will continue to upload the day's top stories as regularly as possible." Saturday's news held over on a Sunday in May. A contributing writer says the company hired by the newspaper to run the Web site backed out because of payment problems.
McKinney, who believes the layoffs were overdue, isn't counting on becoming the News' next owner. Still, he knows what he would do to revive the patient: He would make inroads in the "country club communities" to the west, which are populated by the 55- to 60-year-old set and unmined by the Palm Beach Post and South Florida's Sun-Sentinel.
Martin may be unwilling to sell the paper outright, and that's the only way McKinney would buy it. But in the martinis-in-sandals world of South Florida, deals are made and unmade on a dime.
"It's a business decision that's going to have to be made between the two of us," McKinney says. Martin "might say it's not for sale, but in South Florida, everything's for sale for the right price."