Mike Petrak
Executive Vice President, Tactician Media
Mike Petrak is Executive Vice President of Tactician Media, which consults with media organizations. He also is Managing Partner of Prism XL, a consultancy for media, finance, education and technology. Petrak is former Publisher of the Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register.
Quotes
These are rich philanthropic people who really care about local news and worry about the state of the free press in the United States, so they have created models that now allow local news in part to be financed through charitable trusts.
So now there are new entrants to the market that are entirely new that say we care enough about journalism and it’s important enough in our community that we will support it through charitable grants and they’ve set up new economic models to do that, Philadelphia probably being the foremost.
I think that it’s harder for local owners who don’t have scale to compete anymore, so let’s start with that. The reason that more newspapers have been sold in the last two years than any other time in history is because it’s just harder for them to compete. So let’s talk about GateHouse. They’re the largest newspaper company by both circulation, I believe, and certainly by the number of newspapers. They have 550 publications now and yet their business model is they really find economies of scale at reduced costs. ... They have created a Center for News and Design in Austin, Texas, that they essentially have taken somebody who used to make $80,000 a year as a copy editor and now they can hire somebody to do that job for multiple, multiple, multiple markets because it’s all in one place and so they’ve kind of in-sourced it, so to speak. So they’ve created a business model to really reduce costs and it allows them some competitive advantages. They also have a very good digital network that they have created and they have been very smart about that.