Milt Helmer comes off as a happy salesman—all smiles under a thinning twist of salt-and-pepper hair—but the retiree glares through his square glasses if he thinks somebody’s trying to pry hard-earned bits of wisdom out of him. “What should the daily newspapers do to remain viable? Let them figure that out for themselves. I’m not here to solve their problems,” he says.
The former publisher of The Shopper/Free Press, a free weekly owned by his family for fifty-one years, knows that newspapers across the United States are having a hard time. He’s heard the stories of lost advertisers, declining circulation, and brutal personnel cuts. But The Shopper/Free Press Company—now run by Helmer’s nephews—isn’t just surviving in today’s cutthroat environment, it’s thriving.
Helmer’s parents, Clayton and Gertrude, founded their own newspaper, The Reporter, in 1940, the same year the couple opened a printing business in their basement—but closed it in 1968 as their free paper, The Shopper, took off.
That The Shopper has grown from a single ad-laden paper with a few thousand circulation in the Ellsworth, Wis., area in 1956 to a seven-paper chain—the Hudson Free Press, Baldwin Shopper, River Falls Shopper, Miss-Croix Shopper, Ellsworth Shopper, Hiawatha Valley Shopper, and Hastings Free Press (with a combined circulation of 60,000)—is even more surprising when you see its headquarters. The operation is run out of an office building that was Helmer’s childhood home in the tiny western Wisconsin village of Beldenville. As each new paper was started, farmhouse rooms were converted into offices, and aluminum-sided additions grew off the back of the house and spilled down a backyard hill.
“Bigger subscription papers used to think of free papers as throwaways or junk,” Helmer said. “Now we’ve taken the lead. Free newspaper circulation across America in the last five years has eclipsed dailies. More people are reading free papers than paid dailies.”
According to industry audits, he’s right. The latest figures from the Circulation Verification Council show free weeklies sending out 66.8 million copies a week.
Subscription dailies are sending out 55.3 million copies a week, and are on the decline. The numbers reflects not only a continuing downward trend for traditional newspaper circulation, but their means of delivery: The free newspapers usually go to every door in their coverage area, while subscription papers only go to those who buy them.
“This is not a business for the faint of heart, but it can be done quite well,” said Joe Green, president of the Independent Free Papers of America trade group. “The Helmers have done quite well when the markets are strong and have survived multiple downturns. People who survive when it’s tough, they’re generally successful.”
Green attributes the success of free papers to the fact that, like the Helmer papers, most are family-run by folks who “show up every day and work twelve hours.”
Helmer’s papers are just a handful of the seventy-some free “shoppers” and community newspapers delivered across Minnesota, the southeast corner of South Dakota and the southwest corner of Wisconsin, according to the Minnesota Free Paper Association. These publications are heavy on ads and light on news. The eight or nine paid columnists in each issue don’t focus on what the New York Times might classify as current events. In fact, traditional hard news—Tornado kills 20 or Council votes to raise taxes—doesn’t usually make it into the shoppers.
In one edition of the Hastings Free Press, for example, a columnist ruminates on the possibility of a man-rabbit hybrid: “Could he run fast? Could he hear better? Would he snack on carrots at work?” Another writer speaks directly to the person who stole his deer-hunting tree stand: “The individual who stole [it] knows nothing about nobility, respect, or ethics.” A grandmother writes film reviews and rates each one in baseball terms: Flushed Away got a two-bagger, while Running with Scissors only garnered a base rap.
If paid dailies aren’t about to throw in the towel and become free and community papers, they’ve at least adopted some of their strategies: In recent years the industry has introduced weekly editions focused on individual suburban regions, and is implementing plans to focus its daily coverage on local news. In 2004, the Pioneer Press created separate editions to focus on Dakota and Washington counties, the north metro, and western Wisconsin; several large newspapers, from the Los Angeles Times to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have lately endeavored to add advertising revenue by purchasing and running smaller community papers.
Helmer doesn’t worry about encroachment by the competition. The company’s seven papers are entrenched in their communities. “There’s generations that don’t know anything else,” he said. “There’s a part of our community that hasn’t read anything else. In fact, when they say they read it in the paper, they usually mean us.”
Leave a Reply Cancel reply