The Breakfast Club

With print media in competition with the
Internet and cable news for its readership, maintaining home delivery
stable is considered success for a daily publication. Newspapers are in
a state of decline, and we wanted to reverse that,” says the
42-year-old Emanuel, who came to The Citizen from The Corning Leader,
where he also led that paper’s shift to morning distribution. “I knew
that this community would embrace us even more as a morning
publication. We began research this spring to make sure the community
would be waiting for us.”

It was, in the end, a matter of
survival. Newspaper readers are getting older, and families are getting
busier. The average male reader of The Citizen, according to
the paper’s own research, is age 48 to 60; women skew just slightly
younger, 45 to 58. “We were trying to address the issues with those
time-starved readers,” says Emanuel. “They get home at night, they are
running the kids around to little league and soccer games and all the
rest, and they’re telling us that if they don’t get to read the paper
in the morning, they don’t have time to read it later.”

The Citizen is owned by Lee
Enterprises, a Davenport, Iowa, company that operates 56 daily and 145
weekly papers across the country, including The Skaneateles Journal. With the switch at The Citizen, Lee has only three afternoon papers left, and those three are all considering abandoning the matinee format.

Emanuel had feared that the shift might
put an end to an icon of the publishing business: the paperboy, or as
he calls them “youth carriers.” Surprisingly, this was not the case.
“We have 65 drivers who deliver the paper, and we had 31 youth
carriers. When we made the switch, 22 of the youth carriers decided it
did not fit their schedules. But nine of them made the switch, and
their families supported them.”

Hundreds of afternoon papers have closed in the United States over the past half-century. Many of them, like the Syracuse Herald-Journal, which breathed its last in September 2001, folded their operations into a morning paper owned by the same company. The Buffalo Courier-Express closed its doors in 1982. The Staten Island Advance,
flagship paper of the S.I. Newhouse chain, continues to defy the trend,
and is New York state’s largest circulation afternoon paper, reaching
more than 61,000 readers in New York City’s smallest borough every
afternoon. 

Given the tough times facing afternoon dailies, it is something of a mystery that The Citizen
managed to survive as long as it had with its late-day format. “We
jumped early into the online era,” admits Emanuel, who helped launch
the paper’s first Web site in 1998. “Without that we wouldn’t have
survived. By newspaper standards, we were pretty early.” Now the ads
placed on the site account for 7 percent of the paper’s revenue. 

There have been complaints from people
who have become accustomed to the afternoon-paper habit. “I remember
one older lady who called to tell me that she was having a very
difficult time,” Emanuel says. “She couldn’t get used to it. I told her
that she was perfectly free to leave her paper on the porch until 5
p.m., and then bring it in to read with her dinner. She was just
delighted, and she called back to tell me that it was working pretty
well for her.”

—Ed Griffin-Nolan