![]() To be clear, local employees of those papers were not at fault when it came to the abuse those papers suffered under JRC ownership. He poured his resources into the newly acquired papers at the height of the Great Recession, kept them going, improved them and hired local managers to reconnect those papers to their communities. But he knew the readers and advertisers of those communities also deserved to have their hometown papers brought back to life. The other papers included in the JRC acquisition - Sanilac County News, Jeffersonian, Buyers Guide, Tri-County Citizen, Brown City Banner - were on life-support, too, and Burrough had his work cut out for him. Soon after, the motto "Locally Owned - Locally Connected - Locally Committed" was added to the front-page flag of The County Press. That group included the once-proud County Press that had been reduced to a cookie-cutter facsimile of other JRC papers.īurrough had come full circle in his desire to serve Lapeer County readers and advertisers and immediately set about restoring The County Press to its role as a community asset. A year later, in 2008, Burrough completed his first acquisition when he bought the Davison Index.Īnd then, in 2009, after a year's-worth of wrangling, Burrough bought a group of eight newspapers from the Journal Register Company, a corporation known for gutting newspaper properties of their cash and other assets and using bankruptcy court to shed long-term liabilities. And again with the Burton View two years after that. He did it again two years later when he launched the Grand Blanc View. I believed that if I could assemble a staff of enthusiastic newspaper professionals, give them top-of-the-line technology, and create a philosophy based on satisfying readers, we would have the formula for success.Īgain, I think he hit the mark. You're not an editor or publisher, how do you expect to be successful in the newspaper business?" Some have asked me "Why start another newspaper in the Lapeer area. He wrote in that first edition LA View column: Like many in Lapeer County, Burrough was disappointed and announced his intentions to start a competing newspaper. After Fitzgerald moved on to the Detroit Free Press and Myers sold the paper to the first of several out-of-state, absentee corporate owners, The County Press had lost its local focus. We worked together at The County Press and its sister company Webco Press, during the waning years of the Bob Myers-Jim Fitzgerald era when the newspaper was known across the country as "America's Largest Rural Weekly," and the paper annually won state and national awards for excellence. I had the pleasure of working with Burrough before he acquired his own commercial printing company, Michigan Web Press, and started his newspaper company. Not only with the Lapeer Area View, but with the other 13 community newspapers he has started or acquired in the intervening two decades since that initial launch. I may be slightly biased in my assessment of how Burrough has lived up to those four goals, but I'd say he's met the mark on every one of them. When Rick Burrough launched the LA View 20 years ago, his front-page column in the inaugural edition stated his mission for the new newspaper as: (1) create a newspaper that reflects the varied interests and lifestyles of Lapeer-area residents (2) listen to our readers and provide the information they want and need (3) become a vital part of the community and (4) become the Lapeer area's MUST READ newspaper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |