When one of our reporters learned a week ago that an 11-month-old Vero Beach infant had just received a rare heart transplant at Joe DiMaggio Hospital, it was instantly obvious to our editors that this Christmas miracle should be the lead front page story of our Christmas issues.
As tidings of great joy to share with the people of our community during the yuletide season, it doesn’t get any better than that.
And so it was this past week – a banner headline across the top of Vero Beach 32963, our weekly paper for the barrier island where the baby’s grandparents live; and a huge photo and story on the front of Vero News, our weekly distributed to the mother’s neighbors and friends on the Indian River County mainland.
Apparently, however, the significance of this heartwarming hometown news story was not so obvious to editors of the local daily.
On Christmas morning, the story “Vero family gets holiday miracle” was lost among the ads on Page 2 of the Press Journal, while the front page featured stories from Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie.
Port St. Lucie? How many times do Vero and Sebastian readers need to tell the editors down in Stuart that we don’t much care about Martin and St. Lucie counties?
Indian River County residents are far more interested in things that involve us and our friends and neighbors. Local news!
This latest astonishing lapse in news judgment occurred just four days (!) after publisher Bob Brunjes assured Press Journal readers in a page one column that Treasure Coast Newspapers is committed to better serving Vero – “a community that has served us so well.”
The problem, of course, is actions speak louder than words. And the actions that produce a daily paper which appears mornings in fewer and fewer Vero driveways are all orchestrated from afar.
Not for a long time have decisions been made in the white elephant Press Journal building on US1, as was finally acknowledged a couple of weeks ago in the decision to close and sell it.
Just this past week, the daily has been advertising for a new education reporter to cover schools in Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River Counties.
“This position will be based in Stuart, Florida,” the ad states. That increasingly is where most Press Journal writers are based.
Can a reporter new to Vero really get a fix on “how effectively schools educate students” in Indian River County if her office is located an hour’s drive to the south, and she is working for an executive editor who would have trouble finding most places in our community without a GPS? We think not.
But with the daily, once-over-lightly reporting is increasingly what we get.
In that same column the Sunday before last, publisher Brunjes claimed the Press Journal has “the largest local newsgathering team in Indian River County.”
We wonder who told him that? It’s not even close to the truth. In 2014, while the Press Journal office in Vero was losing one veteran journalist after another, we were hiring four experienced reporters – all of whom go to work each day right here in our community.
The team of journalists that publishes Vero Beach 32963, Vero News, Sebastian River News, and VeroNews.com is now almost twice the size of the shrinking Vero Beach “bureau” of Treasure Coast Newspapers. We plan to further expand our roster of top reporters in 2015, and our ad on JournalismJobs.com does not say “based in Stuart.”
So what will the New Year bring for the two news organizations that serve Indian River County readers?
At some point in the first half of 2015, the Press Journal and other Scripps papers will be spun off into a new stand-alone company that will no longer have the financial backing of WPTV Channel 5 and the other lucrative local TV stations that will remain with Scripps.
While the new company is being launched with a dowry of $10 million, that amount – when divvyed up among 14 papers – may not provide much of a cushion. The newspaper unit of Scripps, according to their most recent quarterly results, barely made enough money to cover expenses as revenue declined another 4.4 percent.
Vero Beach 32963 Media, LLC, on the other hand, is hoping for another record year in 2015 as publisher of your local weekly papers. Revenue has increased every year since our 2008 launch.
Our new mainland paper, Vero News/Sebastian River News, is off to an even better start than Vero Beach 32963 was seven years ago. And our online breaking news site, VeroNews.com, is now the most widely viewed website for news of Indian River County. (By the way, VeroNews.com is free – and will remain that way.)
That’s not to say life is easy. And we owe the successes of the past – and pin our hopes for 2015 – on you. If you like receiving the paper each week, tell our advertisers; they support these papers. If you know of something we should be covering, give us a call. If you see something you wish we were doing differently, let us know.
For our part, our editors and reporters in 2015 will continue to try to live up to the goal we set when we launched Vero Beach 32963: Publishing “news others miss, or choose to ignore.”