Randy Lovely

Former Vice President of Community News, Gannett

Randy Lovely recently retired as Vice President of Community News for Gannett. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for News and Audience Development at the Arizona Republic and was Executive Editor of the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California.

Quotes

Increasingly what we’re trying to do — and the goal for us is to get to about a 50-50 divide — is between our revenue being driven by advertising versus our revenue being driven by consumers and getting more and more to where consumers are paying for the content they’re consuming.

Quite honestly, we’re approaching what I would probably characterize as the death of the 15-inch story. Because if it can’t prove itself to be really worth the investment of time and then you create a really great, rich narrative experience with the interactive graphics and the videos as well as the narrative writing, if the story doesn’t merit that, it really then needs to be in that bucket of being much more utilitarian and much more scannable.

We’ve tried doing packages among local properties. So for example, if you live in Milwaukee but you spend the winters in Phoenix, would you like to have a subscription to both? That has not really proven to be all that advantageous because I just don’t think that’s a big enough bucket of people to do that.