Ronald Roenigk - Transcript
Interviewee: Ronald Roenigk
Interviewer: Dorothy Nygren and Michael Meyer
Place: North Clark St., Chicago, Illinois
Date: November 24, 2019
Transcriber: Dorothy Nygren
Time: 00:20:55
Copyright © 2020 Edgewater Historical Society
DN: Today is November 24, 2019 and we’re at the home of Ronald Roenigk, one of our 2020 Living Treasures, on North Clark Street. My name is Dorothy Nygren of the Edgewater Historical Society. With me doing the interview is Michael Meyer, the head of our Living Treasures committee. Martin Stewart is also with us. First of all, I’d like to congratulate you on being chosen as one of the 2020 Living treasures Ron, for all the work you’ve done for our community. It’s been very impressive and very appreciated.
RR: Thank you very much. It’s always nice to have somebody appreciate your work.
DN: The first question I’d like to ask you is when did you come to Edgewater? Why did you come here?
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RR: The year was 1986 and I came here because I actually got serious about a woman and we were planning on getting married at the time. We were living in Lincoln Park, renting a place in Lincoln Park and I had my office in Lincoln Park, I had only been in business for four years at that time. We realized we were going to settle down We couldn’t afford Lincoln Park although it wasn’t nearly as expensive back then as it is now. We just kept moving further north until we could find a neighborhood we could afford with off street parking. That was one of the definitely things we wanted to have.
Finally we went all the way up to the lakefront, to Edgewater, and found this place, Joseph Winsburg’s former residence. He was moving to Texas. We bought the house from Joseph Winsburg in 1986 and it was mostly because we could afford it. Then actually shortly after that I moved my business out of Lincoln Park and moved it to Lincoln Square. It was actually quite close for me to get there. On some days I could walk there, take a bus, ride a bike or drive. It made it quite easy to get to and from work at Lincoln Square.
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DN: How did you get involved in publishing a neighborhood newspaper?
RR: I actually started working with a local bank in Chicago in 1982. It’s currently called Byline Bank but at the time I was working, it was North Community Bank. I was doing the marketing for opening the branches. What the bank would do when they opened a branch was to create a newspaper for a short period of time to promote the bank being open. We would put out these newspapers in different neighborhoods and put in bank advertising and bank promotions. Then I would fill up the rest of the newspaper with neighborhood news. The bank president said, “If you can sell any other ads into this publication, it would cut our overhead and I’ll let you keep half of the money you’ve made by selling ads into it.” I did that a couple of times and realized I could make more money doing this than I could working for the bank.
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Actually with the bank’s blessings, I left and took the newspaper with me. At the time we called it The Good News Weekly because it was never tied to one neighborhood in particular. It kind of moved around depending on when we were opening up the editions. So I took over the publication in late 1982. I had only been working for the bank about eight months. Then I was just a year and a half out of college. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have any business sense more or less. I was just poor enough and stupid enough that no one would loan me any money or let me get in trouble because I only had to live by what my checking account was. So it was really the fact is that I took a marketing tool that the bank was using and realized there was a place for it. It was not a new idea. Ben Franklin did it a long time ago. But it really just came out of an idea to promote bank branches but then I realized there was a market for this publication. That was really the genesis for it.
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DN: Why do you think there’s a market for it?
RR: Well because, one of the things we were doing was to take a very tight geographical area and cover it with newspapers. We’d flood the area with newspapers. Again not a new idea. Put fliers in everybody’s hands. Let people see what they can hold and read and it will basically get your message across. Newspapers were a very accepted way of communicating at that time. There was no internet. There was TV and radio. But still newspapers were a go-to place for people to find news. One of the things I’ve realized over the years in the news business is it’s very easy to get readership if you just give people information that they want to know about. If you just cover stuff that has to do with their lives, their neighborhoods, their place in society, they’ll read your paper and they’ll keep coming back for more, as long as they find something of value in it. The hard part is always selling someone to support that – getting the advertising. The fact that the newspaper seemed like a good idea was not my idea. It was something that had been well established for a long time. What I was doing was really picking market areas that could sustain the business side of a newspaper.
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DN: So how do you see the difference between a newspaper such as the Tribune and the News Star besides the focus that you have on the local aspect of it. In terms of your mission?
RR: To some extent, we’re the same. Their market area is just much larger, with broader appeal. They have to appeal to a regional basis. When I compare us to the Tribune – it’s not really a fair comparison because the geographic areas that we cover are really quite small. The News Star is actually the smallest footprint of all of our three newspapers. They’re really based on township boundaries. That means for me I’m trying to think about what we are supposed to be doing. I try to think about –if I were a property owner, if I were a tenant, if I were a resident, if I were a business owner what would I want to know? What would most concern me? That would always lead me to pick the most local issues and stories. At that point, try to do a good job of it. Pick that line and try not to be biased and unfair. Sometimes people are uncomfortable with what you are reporting on, but I think if you just treat it straight up and don’t pull your punches, most people will accept it.
Now the News Star – that wasn’t the paper I started with – we took them over later. You come with a reputation. When we took over the old Lerner papers, it came with a reputation. People knew it already. They trusted it. It wasn’t really hard to play off that and carry it through. People are smarter than you realize. You really can’t do stuff that’s off the wall and just completely whack-a-doodle them and think you can get away with it. We’re not powerful enough or big enough to get away with it. So we pretty much have to cover straight up news.
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DN: You make it sound like a walk in the park but you were telling me that in the 1980s with the financial meltdown… maybe you could talk about the struggles that you had.
RR: Yes, I think everybody has gone through some recessions when you get to be our age. Some of them are harder than others. Certainly the crash after 9/11 was vicious but it was short. The crash in 2009 was vicious and everything just dried up. That was certainly a critical time for our place and we suffered like everybody else. We found we had to do severe cutbacks. Oddly this was just as the internet age was coming along. Newspapers were in a mad rush to get on the internet. At that point, when I was deciding what to keep and what to jettison, one of the things we jettisoned was our office and our house here. The other thing we jettisoned was our on-line publishing. When I looked at my profit and loss statement, we were losing money every edition we worked on-line. The only place money was still coming from was the print newspaper.
So one of the things we did was get off the internet in 2009 and we were off until 2013 or 2014. We were making money in print. Why would we want to do this online version? It was strictly a business decision. Readership? Great. You can get all the readership you want online. You just can’t make money. That was what my main concern was coming out of that recession.
My mind was laser focused on putting attention and effort was on the side that was making money. That was print. That was the newspaper. The online version wasn’t making money. Still to this day we make 90% of our revenue in print. But when we decided to go back online, we put a pay wall on our newspaper. So you can pick up the printed version and read it for free, but if you want to read the online version, you’ve got to pay $20 a year for a subscription. My goal was just to break even. Now we’re actually making money on subscriptions. Last year and this year have been pretty good with subscriptions. Finally the internet has proven its worth by people paying for something that they could pick up for free if they just went to the grocery store.
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DN: I’d like to pursue that a little bit more. Why do you think the online is not making money? Was it the ads not coming through?
RR: Yes. Initially the model people had was to put banners and buttons on it. The core problem with that is that nobody goes on a content site to conduct commerce. And nobody goes to a commerce site for content. There’s a line people take [gesturing with his bands, initially together and then taking two paths]. Either people are going to shop or they are going to read. And it’s not just us. It’s across the board. No media ever found that that model was profitable. Then Google and Facebook came along and they created this world in which if Google and Facebook were moving your content, they made all the money and you just lost your content.
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Somehow they decided copyright laws just didn’t matter. They were moving content that was owned from the New York Times on down and giving it away for free. And the newspapers went along with it. A critical mistake made by the worldwide media was thinking, “I know I’m making people pay for all this content with a subscription over here but let’s give it away for free over there.” [Gesturing with his hands from left to right].
That is a critical mistake that the industry made that is still hurting us today – thinking that we’ll give it away for free now and the profits will come later. Well the profits did come, but it went to Google and Facebook. And they’re still suffering under that system. We’re seeing Google making fifty billion (dollars) per quarter and the Chicago Tribune a shell of its former self. That’s really why, on a very small level, I recognized that. I guess it’s maybe because of my training. Coming through the bank as I first did, they said, “If you selling advertising along with the bank business, you cut our overhead.” I always said, “I’m a business first, and a newspaper second.” When you get down to looking at your monthly profit and loss statement at the end of the month, where is the money coming from and where is it going?
(00:12:59)
When it got rough I realized the internet was where we were spending a lot of money and it wasn’t coming getting it back. That was the situation for us and practically every newspaper in the country. You can get a ton of readership online. You just can’t make money at it. I have a funny little thing I tell people. Back in the ’80s and ’90s I was paying a flat rate fee to writers when they were writing a story for us. And that rate remains the same today. Only in 1990 I was under paying reporters. And now I’m overpaying reporters because what they get to publish a story online is offensive. I mean you can’t imagine how little these reporters are getting paid to do work. It’s less than minimum wage, way less.
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DN: It’s really fascinating to hear the story of your perspective of how the publishing/newspaper business has changed with the internet and global businesses. What do you see the future of a small newspaper being?
RR: I’ll tell you. Right now is a very difficult time to be in the newspaper business on any level. What we have going for us and what a lot of small newspapers have going for them is that we have no staff. And we don’t have a printing operation. I lease space at a commercial printer over on Northwest Highway. So I don’t have a large capital investment. I just have a desk, a chair, and some computers. So I didn’t need to spend a lot of money. Or borrow a lot of money to get started whereas a lot of large newspapers have extensive real estate holdings. They have leveraged assets and outright debt. That’s what killing a lot of them today. The debt. So if I had to spend a lot of money on overhead, which I don’t, because I work out of my house with a desk, chair, and computers. I have no debt to worry about. There is no debt. Our company is running on a strict cash basis so it’s much easier to manage the overhead. For a small paper that’s more manageable because you have no debt. If you are a big company, a publishing trade company, you have stockholders, you have bonds, whatever you have out there, you have fixed costs that you have to come up with every month to pay for. If you get in trouble, you have to go through bankruptcy, which is what happened to a lot of publishing companies. I think being small is to our advantage right now.
(00:15:40)
DN: I’d like to ask you what you feel about your readership. Do you feel you have equal readership across the age span? What do you see?
RR: No. Actually I know what out readership is. We are an audited newspaper. The audit bureau does an annual readership survey which shows we have little readership under the age of twenty-three - 1%. I think that’s always been the case. I like to say that our best reader is a) a nosy neighbor b) with a mortgage. So it’s not until people get invested in their neighborhood ….Kids are interested in it but not to the extent that an adult would be – not somebody with a job, a mortgage, a family and a house that walks the streets and doesn’t want to get mugged. All of a sudden they become very interested in the neighborhood and have stakes at play. So we have never tried to reach the youth audience. Back when we first got started, there was the Reader. They were the entertainment, the party newspaper. People would look at the Reader for a) their first apartment or b) what to do this weekend. Now online, it’s that same thing. If somebody wants to know what to do this weekend, they don’t look at our newspaper. Somebody isn’t looking at our newspaper unless they want to know where the church bake sale is. So we have always looked at our niche as an owner more established clientele. Right now the majority of our readers are probably between thirty and fifty-five. That’s just when people are having families; they’re busing houses; they’ve been in the workforce for a while; and all of a sudden they’re nosy neighbors. That’s our market.
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DN: Do see any fluctuations in the amount of copies you publish? Has it grown over the years or has it pretty much stayed the same?
RR: No. It’s because we are a free newspaper. It wasn’t always that way. The Lerner papers were subscription papers so that was ebb and flow. Ours is a free newspaper. So this is what I call demand circulation. So when somebody asks to get a newspaper in their building we’ll deliver it to their building. If they want it in their high rise or business, we put it there. But it’s kind of a fixed number. It fluctuates from year to year. But what’s going for us right now, honest to gosh, is the online subscriptions. It’s because people now read at home on their tablet or computer. And that’s just the way it is. But what they see is just the same thing that they would see in the printed version. That’s why what subscriptions are fluctuating are the ones online. If someone calls from a building and says, ‘I’d like to get your newspaper in my building,” we put it in their building. When we got back next week if there are five papers too many, we leave five less. If the doorman says, “We could use another ten newspapers.” We leave ten more. So it’s really based on demand and it’s really a fixed number. It’s not as fluctuating as if you would have subscribers that come and go. In every neighborhood you have a twenty or thirty percent transition as people move out. That doesn’t really affect us per se because we know how many newspaper we can move at any particular location where we deliver newspapers.
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DN: You’ve covered a lot of community groups and other non-profit organizations. I’m sure over the past forty years you’ve seen a change in how people spend their time doing community work or volunteer work. Could you comment on that?
RR: Well it’s almost something that comes organically from people. I think it’s the same with the readership. When you invest in a community and all of a sudden you see where there’s a problem and you say, ‘Well I can call 911. I can call City Hall. I can call my alderman. But it’s not going to happen unless I do something. “So joining and bonding together in a social network….I mean before there was social media there was a Kiwanis club, the chamber of commerce, a church group, the ladies club. … You had all of these organizations and they did stuff that made their communities stronger and better. They created social networks in person instead of online. So I don’t think that’s necessarily new. As long as us, as a media entity, finds out about them and encourages people to contact us, because we can only do so much. I mean I count on people reaching out to us. Incredibly. Without the library telling us what events are coming up, I wouldn’t know. I don’t have time to go to all the libraries. I’ve got reporters that are out there. We have a certain amount of foot power out there who are working the streets but by and large about 80% of the stuff I know comes to me.
[Recording ends abruptly due to lost file]
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