Twenty years ago this month, when John J. Schumann Jr. agreed to sell the Press Journal and get out of the then-healthy daily newspaper business, he was motivated mostly by the numbers. But not the numbers you might think.
He did not foresee the coming of the digitally driven decline of the daily newspaper industry. Nor did he know that he was selling at what proved to be the peak of the market.
The numbers that mattered were 65, 70 and 40.
“By 1996, I was approaching retirement age,” Schumann said in an interview. “I was almost 65, and that year the Press Journal was 70 years old. The family had owned it for 70 years. That was a nice, round figure.”
So was 40.
“I had been there, when I was in high school and college, on a part-time basis,” Schumann said. “But it was 40 years full-time, the family had owned it 70 years and, with 65 approaching, it was time to retire.
“The stars seemed to be aligned,” he added. “I thought that would be a good time to do it.”
Schumann, now 84, remembers contacting the chains, which he said welcomed the opportunity to acquire a local newspaper with what was then a loyal and growing circulation, solid advertising base and strong market penetration.
In fact, when Schumann began taking offers, the Press Journal was being delivered to 70 percent of the households in Indian River County.
“It was the highest county penetration of any daily in Florida,” Schumann said. “So we had accomplished pretty much all we could, as far as maximizing the market potential.”
In the weeks that followed, the E.W. Scripps Co. wildly outbid several other newspaper chains. “It was significantly higher than the others,” he recalled. And Schumann said his father, before his death, had told him he should consider selling the newspaper when the price was right. “I knew he wouldn’t mind selling,” he said of John Sr. “That made it easier.”
So Schumann, ready to retire and eager to embark on other interests, sold the last Florida daily newspaper wholly owned by a family.
“I thought I’d enjoy some years doing other things,” he said. “I had always enjoyed airplanes and cars, so I’ve been able to spend time doing that. I learned to fly when I was in high school in the 1950s and still enjoy flying.
“And I’ve always been interested in cars,” he added. “Over the years, I’ve accumulated a small collection of sports cars.”
He and his wife, Kathie, also continued their philanthropic involvement in local causes, putting some of the money they received from the sale of the Press Journal back into the community.
The Press Journal continued to do well for a time, but it was under Schumann’s leadership that it prospered most.
“I did everything at one point or another,” he said. “My first job was delivering newspapers to the vending machines located around town.”
He was named editor in 1963 and publisher in 1975, holding both titles for more than 20 years and taking both positions seriously.
Schumann understood what readers wanted and needed from its local daily newspaper.
“The focus was very local for us,” he said. “We found that our readers were more interested in what was happening here, so we had a pretty good-sized news staff and deployed it all right here in the county. People became very accustomed to getting a lot of local news.”
Actually, they became spoiled – something that the Scripps editors, who tried to convince readers to buy into their regional approach, soon would learn.
Schumann was so committed to providing readers with a daily diet of can’t-miss local news that he paid his more-experienced reporters and editors higher wages than offered by most newspapers of the Press Journal’s size, enabling him to maintain a loyal and knowledgeable core of staffers who chose to stay in Vero Beach rather than pursue jobs at bigger papers.
“That was a very conscious effort – to pay higher than would be expected at a paper of our size,” Schumann said. “They could do well here, and that was important. They knew the local scene and local players, and they could report more intelligently and more effectively.
“Their sources were better,” he added, “because they knew their sources.”
They needed to – because throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the Press Journal had daily competition.
At various times, newspaper readers in this county could subscribe to or buy at a newsstand the Miami Herald, Florida (formerly Cocoa) Today, Palm Beach Post and Orlando Sentinel. All four papers had news bureaus here.
“It was a competitive market,” Schumann said, “and it kept us on our toes.”
But in the late 1990s, with the rise of the internet, things began to change. The out-of-town papers pulled out of Vero. And the Press Journal’s circulation and ad revenue began to decline.
Today, the newspaper, based in Stuart for the past 15 years, has half the circulation it had in its heyday, and operates only a small bureau in Vero Beach. Last year, Scripps got out of the business, swapping its newspapers for a group of TV stations. The transaction gave ownership of the Press Journal to a new company called the Journal Media Group, albeit only briefly.
Last month, the Journal Media Group – including the Press Journal – sold itself to Gannett, which also owns Melbourne-based Florida Today.
Asked to assess the Press Journal’s operations and quality of the product under its three newspaper-chain owners, Schumann, still a subscriber and daily reader, said: “I would say they’ve done the best they can do to adapt to changing times.
“It’s disappointing to see the decline, because I think it’s important in the type of government we have that people get their news from reliable sources and I’m not always sure that that’s the case on the internet,” Schumann said. “So that’s a real concern.”
How would Schumann have adapted to these drastic and debilitating changes in the industry? Not being “in the loop,” as he put it, he’s not sure what he would’ve done.
Except for this: Continue to publish a newspaper chock full of the local news that readers here once expected from his Press Journal.
“It would’ve been disappointing to be in a market where there would be challenges to circulation for the newspaper, because we had always been able to increase circulation year after year,” Schumann said. “That’s certainly a big challenge now.”
Yet Schumann insists this county, because of its demographics, is still a strong market for print publications – yes, even a daily newspaper.
“We have a seven-day-a-week paper here, where some larger communities don’t,” he said. “There’s Vero Beach 32963, which is a nice-sized weekly, printed on quality paper, and loaded with a lot of good, local content, all of which is attractive to advertisers.
“There’s also Vero Beach Magazine, which is a thriving example of print journalism. So it’s pretty obvious that people here like to read about what’s going on in their community.”
Schumann still believes in local newspapers, values the importance of the watchdog role they play and remains optimistic that someone somewhere will someday find a way for them to make enough money off their online content to survive.
“I’m certainly very hopeful,” Schumann said. “Who else is going to cover your school board or county commission meetings? Television news covers some things, but not the issue-related stories and not with the thoroughness that we need. I’d hate to think newspapers can’t make it, because people need to know about these things.”
He paused for a moment, then added: “Isn’t Warren Buffett investing in local newspapers? I find that encouraging. . . . This is a very good newspaper market. If newspapers are going away, this might be the last place to go.”
