Newspapers on the edge Publisher/editor/employee of 3 tiny state papers is waiting for St.

Paul to grow out to him

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 7.4.2002

BY RICK ROMELL

Woodville -- It's easy to see what Duane DeYoung is doing: He's perched before a computer, sweating out a headline for the top story in the latest edition of the Woodville Leader.

Figuring out why he's doing it is another matter.

It's almost 10 on a Tuesday night, and all lights are off at the Leader office except for the bright fluorescents above the composing table and the glow from DeYoung's monitor. He's been working since 4:30 -- a.m.

DeYoung is the Leader's editor -- he's also the paper's publisher, circulation manager, advertising manager, owner and only full-time employee -- but he doesn't especially like creating headlines. He doesn't like writing either. Or selling ads.

"Why am I doing this?" he repeated when asked that question earlier in his 17-hour day. "God only knows."

He actually has good reasons, but immediate financial reward isn't among them. He draws no salary. His accountant tells him his business, with about $180,000 in sales, made money last year, but not much.

And now, after a pre-dawn to dark shift of taking photographs, picking up ad copy, laying out newspaper pages, laboring at the keyboard -- DeYoung can't touch-type -- and, finally, covering a raucous Village Board meeting, he's ready to go home.

The work's not done. DeYoung still has to fill some blank spots in the Leader's sister papers, the Elmwood Argus and the Spring Valley Sun. And after all the pages are composed, he still has to pack them in one of his aging cars and drive 30 miles to his printer in Amery, who wants the material by about 6 a.m. each Wednesday.

But if DeYoung keeps chugging along and wraps things up tonight, it might put him on the road around bar time, and he doesn't like that prospect.

"So it's just best," he says before tapping out his final headline, "to call it a day and get up again at 4:30."

Putting out three of the state's smallest newspapers each week is no small job.

-- -- --

By the count of industry trade journal Editor & Publisher, there are about 6,600 weeklies in the United States. The Leader, Sun and Argus, with respective circulations of about 475, 430 and 350, appear to fall well within the smallest 3%.

Such papers can be profitable. Montana-based newspaper broker John Cribb, who has handled many weekly deals, said he knew of owners making $70,000 to $80,000 a year from operations even smaller than DeYoung's.

"But I certainly wouldn't say that's normal or easy," Cribb said.

"It can be pretty tough."

As DeYoung knows. His weeklies are part of a company he calls Best Press, which also includes a free advertising paper and a job printing shop that has one employee. He has held the Leader for five years, the Argus and Sun for two, and has stayed afloat this far through a combination of frugality, ingenuity, flexibility and luck.

When working alone, he typically sets the thermostat in the Leader office at 56 degrees. On production days, the better to limber up his typing-challenged fingers, he might jack the heat up to 60.

Home, which DeYoung shares with his wife, Michele, and their two children, also runs lean.

"We eat spaghetti a lot," DeYoung said.

DeYoung is 37, with a round shape and a sly smile. He seems tranquil -- despite the occasional 17-hour day -- and good-humored.

Early in his newspaper career, he wrote a column, "The Editor's Shorts." It ran under a grainy photo of DeYoung in baggy plaid Bermudas and dark socks. But he doesn't feel he should publish his personal observations on the local scene anymore. After all, he's also Woodville's municipal judge.

DeYoung, who was elected to the $100-a-month post in 2000 and is unopposed this year, isn't a lawyer. He's a former electrical engineering student, a business graduate of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a person who, as he describes it, can easily complicate his life if he has a little extra time on his hands.

"I just get involved in way too many things," he said.

He has, among other ventures, owned a restaurant, dabbled in land development, raised hay and set his father up in the recycling business.

He was living in Woodville and working at a precision molding firm -- he started as a machine operator and ended as compensation manager -- when the Leader became available. As DeYoung tells it, the owner was ready to close shop and walk away. DeYoung bought the paper for just $11,500.

Despite being an editor who doesn't like to write and an advertising salesman who doesn't like to sell, DeYoung found aspects of his chosen business that appealed to him.

He enjoys being in the middle of things and loves small-town life.

He thinks nothing of leaving the Leader office unattended and unlocked when heading out on errands. He keeps his car keys in the ignition.

He likes being near his kids and taking them to events he covers, like the Aloha Carnival coming up in Elmwood. He likes relying on himself, with fault or credit clear. And he likes the challenges he faces.

To do this work full-time, though, he knew he'd need more than one tiny weekly. So when the Sun and Argus were dangled before him, he bit -- for $165,000.

"It's a lot," acknowledged DeYoung, who put $10,000 down and has been paying the former owner $1,300 a month. "It's way more than what I should have paid."

But who could resist a deal that included the weeklies, a shopper, a building in downtown Spring Valley and enough old printing equipment to fill a small museum -- a Ludlow system for setting hot-metal type, a lead-melting oven, letterpresses, a hulking mechanical cutter that can slice through paper four inches thick, cases filled with blocks of wood type.

Just one full alphabet of such type, DeYoung said, easily commands $35 on eBay. He probably has thousands of blocks of the stuff.

-- -- --

A little more than halfway through his production day, DeYoung is in Spring Valley, helping 15-hour-a week employee Debbie Gregerson lay out the Argus and Sun.

They're a little short of copy, which, in the case of the Argus, is partly due to the recent ice storm. It kept a lot of people at home, and that meant things were slow for Argus "Locals" columnist Flora Rayment.

Rayment is 95. DeYoung pays her $10 a week. Neither circumstance hinders her from working the telephone like an eager young police reporter, collecting word of village comings and goings: "Friends were glad to hear that Frank Tomlinson has his airplane ticket for his spring visit to Elmwood." "Reports are that the pancake breakfast sponsored by the American Legion was a success in spite of the weather on Sunday."

Sometimes she kicks out 25 to 30 column-inches worth of items, but this week it's only 14.

"She apologized," DeYoung says.

But DeYoung has plenty of syndicated material to fill out the Argus.

Some of that is slated to go into the Sun, too, along with another of the quotations from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard that have been arriving unsolicited in the mail. Using one of these quotes, besides plugging a hole, carries a bonus.

"I've got a guy who buys 10 papers every time I do it," DeYoung says.

It's not his only revenue-enhancing tactic.

The papers used to charge $5 if someone wanted to publish a note thanking the community for sympathy after a family death. DeYoung raised the price to $10 but offered to run the notices free with a subscription. He figures he has snagged 30 to 40 new customers that way.

He had a different pitch for closeout and surplus merchant C&M Liquidators.

C&M -- where the goods range from hydraulic jacks and masonry trowels to ceramic figurines of poker-playing frogs -- bills itself as "the fun place to shop." Whocbbetter, DeYoung suggested, to sponsor a "Fun Page?"

And that's just what they now do, with the advertising revenue paying for a page full of comics, puzzles and other syndicated features -- and yielding a bit of profit, too.

"I'm telling you, as the smallest papers in the state, you have to do things differently," DeYoung says.

He also plays a few angle shots.

His "office" in Elmwood -- necessary to retain rights to print the local legal notices, an important revenue source -- is a small, sparsely furnished space that used to be a chiropractor's laundry room. You enter from an alley.

Nor is DeYoung above catering to advertisers a bit. Wrestling with the Sun's copy shortage, he falls back on a press release from a hospital in Menomonie, nearly 20 miles away, for prominent display.

It may not be very newsworthy, DeYoung says, but he has space to fill. And, he says of the hospital, "they're a paying advertiser. In a small newspaper, you really do have to work that stuff in."

The afternoon is getting late, and DeYoung decides to finish making up the Sun and Argus that evening in Woodville. But first he settles on the lineup.

For prominent display in the Sun, he chooses a picture of the high school band parent of the year rather than a feature photo of students playing at a music concert.

Rounding out the cover of the Argus will be an article on the Community Club scholarships and the hospital press release. DeYoung slaps the stories on the paste-up board.

"I've got a front page," he says.

-- -- --

"It's very, very difficult to run a small newspaper in today's economy," said Diane Everson, publisher of a 3,000-circulation weekly, The Edgerton Reporter, and immediate past president of the National Newspaper Association. A paper's surrounding area has to have a strong base of potential advertisers, and even then there's plenty of competition for the ad dollar, she said.

Woodville, Spring Valley and Elmwood all have fewer than 1,200 residents, but they're growing, and should DeYoung hold on long enough, he may benefit from development pushing east from the Twin Cities.

"If I build these newspapers up to the point where they have maybe 1,500 subscribers each," he says, "it's going to be worth it. . . .

You have to be a gambling person."

He toys with the notion of expanding -- maybe adding another paper or launching a Saturday edition as a pre-emptive strike against a much-larger chain that recently announced plans to buy four nearby weeklies.

At the moment, though, he needs a little immediate help.

He's back at the Leader. Al Stene is there, too. DeYoung pays Stene to run the printing business. He doesn't pay him to help lay out newspaper pages, but that's what Stene -- a large, quiet man with a collection of honest-to-goodness railroad cars in his yard a few blocks away -- is doing.

He simply likes it. He's usually here on production nights, lending not just a hand but his judgment: DeYoung leaves it to Stene to evaluate the syndicated offerings and select the week's political cartoon.

Meanwhile, DeYoung has called in Michele, who arrives with Joshua, 8, and Abby, 4, in tow and seems decidedly less content than Stene with the way the evening is unfolding. But the C&M ad has to be composed, and Michele can do the job a lot faster than her husband.

Besides, he still has to cover the Village Board.

The meeting turns out to be wild. The board had earlier launched an investigation of serious allegations against the village police chief, but a review panel later cleared him of all but a violation of department procedure.

Now, the board is being ripped by citizens who have packed the meeting room and are spilling into the hall. Some are shouting, some are swearing, and some are calling the trustees liars. The chief looms in a doorway, glowering at the board.

DeYoung takes it in from the floor, where he sits cross-legged, looking tired. He scribbles notes, but he won't be writing a story tonight. Rather, at a break in the meeting, he gets a copy of a statement the village president reads about the board's handling of the controversy, and returns to the Leader office next door.

It's about 8:45 p.m. DeYoung goes to work re-making the Leader's front page so he can run the statement verbatim. Generally, he says, he finishes by 8 on production nights. This will be an exception.

He tinkers until he's made plenty of room for his new top story. By the time he reworks the page and figures out a headline, more than an hour has passed. Stene is gone. The radio -- classic rock out of the Twin Cities -- is still playing.

DeYoung may not have his papers put to bed yet, but at least he now has them in pajamas. He shuts off the music and hits the lights.

Four-thirty comes early.

Message-ID: <3CB1D64C.A7B03A2A@bc.cc.ca.us>
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 10:41:32 -0700
From: Chris Leithiser <cleithis@bc.cc.ca.us>
Subject: Re: fwd: Duane DeYoung

Tilman Hausherr wrote:

<snip>

> But DeYoung has plenty of syndicated material to fill out the Argus.
> Some of that is slated to go into the Sun, too, along with another
> of the quotations from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard that have
> been arriving unsolicited in the mail. Using one of these quotes,
> besides plugging a hole, carries a bonus.
>
> "I've got a guy who buys 10 papers every time I do it," DeYoung
> says.

Gee, can't some critics help this poor guy out? I'm sure there are _lots_ of LRH quotes they could send him, and if you sent the right ones, the "guy" might buy his ENTIRE PRESS RUN for the week. Think of the profit!

Contact DeYoung at:

Woodville Leader PO BOX 155 WOODVILLE WI 54028-9998

(Got the address from a system know as "WISE." No kiddin'.)

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