This was one of the high points of my newspaper career.
After having served as the editor of newspapers in Beavercreek, Ohio (my hometown) for 14 years, I was named as the executive editor of the Suburban Newspapers of Dayton chain of publications in 1998. The company which already had seven newspapers was in the process of acquiring another Dayton-area chain which had eight weekly-newspaper flags.
Mark Raymond, the publisher of the Suburban Newspapers of Dayton, named me as executive editor of the newly combined company after the acquisition was complete. Here is a LinkedIn recommendation he prepared for me years later:
The expanded company published these community newspapers:
- Beavercreek News-Current
- Fairborn Daily Herald
- Kettering-Oakwood Times
- Centerville-Bellbrook Times
- Enon Messenger
- Miamisburg Sun
- Springboro Sun
- Englewood Independent
- Trotwood Independent
- Troy Advocate
- Huber Heights Courier
- New Carlisle Sun
- West Milton Record
- Tipp City Herald
- Vandalia Drummer News
These newspapers had 12 offices around the Dayton community. My office was in Tipp City, considered the hub of the north-Dayton operations. Among my responsibilities upon being named to the position was to convert the production processes of the newly acquired publications, which were still using typewriters to write stories, and manual “paste-up” processes to assemble newspaper pages. My task was to help train and acclimate these newsrooms to working on computers to write and edit stories and to compose newspaper pages.
We also set up a LAN (Local Area Network) of computer servers across the north-Dayton offices, so content could be sent electronically from the outer offices to our pre-press facilities in Tipp City. Instead of creating each page of the newspaper on large “galley sheets” of paper, the offices were able to create and send pages electronically. At the time, it was a major achievement.
SNDNews.com
In the early months of my time as executive editor of Suburban Newspapers of Dayton, I discovered by pure chance a draft of a website project sitting on a work station desktop. I asked if there was any particular plan for it, and was told it was created by the son of a company employee.
Having taken a course in HTML at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, I knew how to read and write the coding that was needed to create web pages. To make a long story short, I expanded upon the HTML coded website draft and created SNDNews.com, the company’s first website. I also trained the staff in our pre-press facility how to take article text sent to them by the various editors and create a web page for each unique article so that the website was frequently updated with new content.
In the pre-year-2000 time frame, this was not at all common for a community newspaper company to have a website updated regularly with new content.
The SNDNews.com website was almost immediately taken down in 2001 when Suburban Newspapers of Dayton was acquired by another publishing company in the region, Brown Publishing.
Management
I had 17 direct reports across the company’s various Dayton-area offices, including the editors of each of the above-listed publications. As executive editor, I was responsible for managing the expenses of the news departments at each of the publications, which had a head count of more than 40 FTEs and a combined budget in excess of $1 million annually. I was successful in that task, keeping expenses within a fraction of a percentage point either above or below budget.
