Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.

MYRNA AQUITANIA    Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA

Posted at 3:13pm on Monday, April 6th, 2009

Need to know who to contact for legal advertising in one of your papers: McLEANSBORO TIMES LEADER - McLEANSBORO, Ilinois.

MAquitania@mnc.net
213/346-0033 x 254

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 4:38pm on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

On February 3, 2009, the Associated Press reported that CNHI CEO Donna Barrett is one of the leaders of a new campaign to fight negative perceptions of the newspaper business:

"Several newspaper executives launched a public relations campaign Monday to counter what they call "gloom-and-doom" reports of the industry's demise.

Sure, they admit, times are tough. The economy is bad, the Internet has sucked away advertising dollars and people are losing jobs.

But the 100 million people who read a newspaper the day after the Super Bowl outnumbered the TV audience for the game, the group said in an advertisement that appeared Monday in more than 300 daily newspapers, including The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

With the ads, commentary pieces and a Web site, the industry is painting itself as a vital source of information and the best place for advertisers to sell anything from grapes to a house _ not the dinosaur often portrayed in the media.

"We are our own worst enemy. It's like there's a rule we have to beat ourselves up," said Donna Barrett, a driving force behind the campaign, called the Newspaper Project. "We are still a dominant media, and we don't give ourselves credit for that."

Barrett, chief executive of Birmingham-based Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., came up with the idea for the blitz with Randy Siegel, publisher of Parade Publications; Brian P. Tierney, CEO of Philadelphia Media Holdings, which publishes The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News; and Jay Smith, the retired CEO of Cox Newspapers, which owns the Journal-Constitution and other papers.

"We are not trying to be Pollyannaish about the newspaper industry, but all the predictions of our demise are just dead wrong," Siegel said."