“I like to see people read,” said Sandra Feinberg, director of the Middle Country Public Library in Suffolk County on Eastern Long Island. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
Lately, she has had a reason to be pleased.
Feinberg, with short-cropped sandy blonde hair, spectacles and a pink and black-patterned jacket, had digressed, but not far. The topic was the publication that lay on the table, The Times of Middle Country, a weekly community newspaper with a circulation of 4,462.
The paper was derived in part from the same fervor that has nourished Feinberg’s 39-year career in literature.
In 2000, Middle Country, an unofficial term that describes the neighboring hamlets of Centereach, Selden and parts of the Village of Lake Grove, was as it is now: without a mayor, town council or zoning board. It was a place where the prolific New York builder Robert Moses’ extensive vision of civilization and steel sputtered at the end of the Northern State Parkway.
Six years ago Feinberg, already responsible for much of the ink pored over in the area (more than a million library items were checked out last year, due in no small part to her establishment of the library as a focal point), sought to solidify a sense of community within a loosely-knit populace, among whom the library had become an ad hoc town hall.
“They’re not organized,” said Feinberg referring to the unincorporated hamlets of Centereach and Selden. “No mayor, we have no authority, we have no control over our development at all.”
She and other local leaders – members of the Chamber of Commerce and the civic associations who envisioned a more centralized Middle Country coalescing over the next 30 years – together hatched the idea of developing a local newspaper, The Times of Middle Country.
The other local print papers in the area at the time were in the tabloid Pennysaver and Yankee Trader vein—each a gaggle of area-business advertising. Thorough classifieds, but no news.
On the other hand, Newsday, covering all of Long Island as well as state government, rarely offered localized content related to Middle Country’s specific areas.
Feinberg was on the board of the Chamber of Commerce. She had recently been reacquainted with Leah Dunaief, publisher of the local Times Beacon Record newspaper chain, after one of Feinberg’s library employees had run into her at a town meeting. Feinberg approached Dunaief about starting a newspaper in Middle Country, and she was persistent.
In 2004 six local newspapers along the North Shore of Long island were operating under Dunaief’s Times Beacon Record Media company. They served Suffolk towns, villages and collections of hamlets that included Setauket, Port Jefferson, Smithtown, Northport, Nesconset, Miller Place, Sound Beach and Rocky Point. She had been considering starting another one for several years in the Town of Huntington, a nearby community that was then without the TBR stamp.
But Feinberg had corralled the support of local businesses, and “she’s not a person that takes no for an answer,” Dunaief says. Through a series of conversations, Feinberg and Dunaief found they had similar views about the character of a community. Dunaief empathized with the need Feinberg saw and redirected her plans.
The first issue of The Times of Middle Country was launched in late 2004.
During initial talks with Dunaief, Feinberg began to grasp the weight of having a local publication. “A newspaper survives because there are literate people, so you’ll often see a strong library in a community where there is a strong paper because they kind of feed on each other,” Feinberg said. “And you might have a bookstore too. It begins to get into the culture.”
A community cannot move forward without literacy, Feinberg said in an interview at her library last month. “When you become educated, you can make educated decisions.”
Declining newspaper circulations
The Times was born as dailies' circulations plunged. (Source: Deutsche Bank Securities and Audit Bureau of Circulations)
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The Middle Country Public Library, a colorful congregation of angles and circular skylights, is located in a quiet neighborhood off a limb of Route 347 in Centereach, Suffolk County, a hamlet of about 30,000. The thoroughfare is of the six-lane sort, defined by what Feinberg calls “strip crap,” along with sequestered coves of the template housing children draw families in front of. Trees and dipping fields interrupt the box stores (national chains like Kmart or Target).
Feinberg has something of a national reputation for her work at the 77,000-sq ft library. In 1979 she established a program called Family Place Libraries that trains more than 50 librarians from around the country each year. She has published four books on youth issues. A gathering of guidelines and tips, “Designing Space for Children and Teens in Public Spaces,” co-written with James R. Keller, is scheduled for a July release from the American Library Association.
“She’s used the library in all sorts of entrepreneurial and original ways,” says Dunaief.
“And she felt, as I do, that one of two things define a community: One is the boundary of the school district. The other is the local newspaper.”
The 75-cent Times — $39 for a yearly subscription — speaks to all corners of the community with the typical weekly paper headlines that update school district and town council plans. But it also includes a lengthy Arts & Culture section with health and food pieces, film reviews and even an Investing 101 column that in the March 4th edition advised readers to disregard market fluctuations and continue with their five-year game plans.
A sharp half-page self-plug conveys Leah Dunaief’s attitude about the relevance of a community paper. A big brother−type holding a child’s hand looks across a dreary empty lot. “The Carnival Schedule was on Page 2,” reads in white letters up top. Below that: “If you don’t want to miss what’s happening around town, we’re your go-to.”
In a recent telephone interview Dunaief said she thinks community newspapers are in the sweet spot of publishing right now. “A lot of places bring the national and international news,” she said. “But very few can you get the local news, because it takes a lot of boots on the street to really dig out the stories and make them unique and interesting from a local point of view.”
She would know.
Leah Dunaief: On the reaction to her first paper
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In 1976 Dunaief, a restless former science writer for Time-Life magazines, had taken umbrage with the quality of the local paper in the hamlet of Setauket where she lived, five miles north of the Middle Country area.
During this time, New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller – who exercised what Dunaief calls an “edifice complex” – was incorporating small Stony Brook University into the large State University of New York system. Jobs and students flooded in.
Around the Stony Brook and Setauket area there was a town-gown split (“town” referring to residents, “gown” referring to professors and students). The local paper covered the community but ignored the 18,000 students and faculty associated with the University, Dunaief said.
Tension reached a “crisis point."
Determined to start her own paper in Setauket, Dunaief went around selling stock to neighbors. Eight families invested at $2,000 each.
“I wanted to run a paper that would cover both sides and be the bridge that would bring the two communities closer," she said. "And I think we’ve done that.”
The Village Times was launched by a staff that knew nothing about publishing or newspaper layout. But all were accomplished writers, Dunaief said.
“We were always vastly under capitalized,” she says. “But we hung in there.”
Twenty-eight years later, her investors long repaid and TBR firmly established as a community news hub, The Times of Middle Country was born as major dailies around the nation, in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and more, flagged beneath untenable business plans and the lure of the Internet.
Leah Dunaief: On women in the workforce
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The notion of starting a local newspaper was shared by Kevin McCormack, then president of the Middle Country Chamber of Commerce, the largest and, perhaps, most functional central organization in the area.
In 2001 McCormack, a banker who was living in Lake Ronkonkoma but working in Centereach, created the Middle Country Chamber of Commerce. (The first thing a banker does, McCormack said, is go to the chamber, introduce themselves and become part of the local community.) A previous chamber had disbanded years before.
“We started out with about a core of six, and it grew to ten, and it grew to fifteen and it grew to 20, then we started having meetings in local restaurants, diners, in the library,” McCormack said. “And I think now, almost ten years later, there are almost 250 members.”
Before the members of the chamber who were involved with selecting a publisher settled on Dunaief they looked at different publishers on Long Island. But “she probably had the cleanest look,” McCormack said. She advertised, she printed in color. “She focused all her other newspapers on community and schools, and that’s what we wanted,” said McCormack, now the chief financial officer for a renewable energy company outside of the area.
Leah Dunaief: On how the Times Beacon Record stands out
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The bond between newspapers and local communities is something journalism advocates also speak passionately about.
Gregory Favre, Distinguished Fellow in Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute, the St. Petersburg, Fl.−based journalism school, has toiled in newsrooms in Atlanta, Chicago, Corpus Christi, Palm Beach and Sacramento for 47 years.
Favre has family in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. And recently he relied on dailies, the Sun-Herald in the Gulport-Biloxi area, and New Orleans’ The Times Picayune, to keep him informed about the wreckage Hurricane Katrina wrought on the area in 2005. “If you look at the history of those two newspapers, for example,” he says, “since Katrina they have done very well as far as circulation is concerned. They’ve done very well as far as business is concerned, because they were there when that community needed them.”
Favre grew up in Bay St. Louis, Miss., a gulf city of 8,000, where decades ago his father owned a weekly titled the Seacoast Echo.
“One thing I learned growing up with my dad’s weekly: I knew when I wrote something—I lived in a town of 5,000 or 6,000 people—I knew I was likely to see the person I wrote about the next day,” Favre said in a phone interview in March. And what he had set in print “damn well better be right.”
The connections between a local newspaper and its readers are much deeper in many ways, Favre said.
“Larger papers like The New York Times, or the Chicago Sun-Times, where I was editor, can’t afford to talk about every Little League game, every cheerleader squad, every honor roll student, who’s getting married, who’s engaged throughout the community,” Favre said. “A weekly newspaper can do that, in addition to covering what’s happening down at city hall.”
Les Anderson, a communications professor at Wichita State University and member of the American Journalism Historians Association, agrees. He and his wife began a community newspaper with a distribution of less than 2,000 in Southcentral Kansas in 1975 called the Ark Valley News. A local newspaper, he said, is the lifeblood of the community.
“We’ve had schools in Kansas that have consolidated, and the towns that have lost their schools sort of dried up,” Anderson said. “The same is true with the newspaper. If a newspaper can’t make it, I think that’s indicative of the spirit of the community itself.”
Decline in advertising
There has been a sharp downturn nationally in classified advertising since 2000. (Source: Newspaper Association of America; 2009 includes Q1-Q3 data and an estimate for Q4.)
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In Middle Country large box stores don’t tend to advertise in local papers, said Leah Dunaief. “Usually when you have a local paper you need to service it by having a lot of mom and pop stores—small retail stores that would look to that newspaper to advertise and reach local residents,” she said. “Local stores that draw from, say, a radius of ten miles.”
The Times of Middle Country continues to rely on print advertising. And advertising in the paper is growing, said Kathryn Mandracchia, who has been advertising director at the Times Beacon Record for 20 years.
Jeffrey Freund, the current president of the Chamber of Commerce, advertises in The Times, though he is uncertain of its efficacy.
“It’s more supporting the paper because I’d like to see the paper stay around, than a marketing decision,” Freund said in a phone interview.
But people continue to advertise, said Kevin McCormack, the former Chamber president. Before his current position as CFO at Eastern Energy Systems, McCormack spent a year at Stony Brook University on a fellowship grant, counseling small businesses on what they needed to do to succeed.
“Everyone would always say, ‘I can’t afford to advertise,’” he recalls. “And the response was, ‘You can’t afford not to advertise.’”
There’s not one thing that’s going to offset the losses that newspapers have suffered, because "advertising as we know it has really changed," said Mary Glick, associate director of the American Press Institute, in a telephone interview. Newspapers can no longer rely on print advertising to finance staff and operations, she added.
As for the Internet, whether the potential move to paid online access affects Middle Country depends on a lot of things, one of which is the size of the community, Glick said.
“It seems that there’s more of a willingness to pay for news when it’s local and exclusive than anywhere else,” she said
The Times’ classifieds are filled with small businesses such as local auto dealers, carpeting stores and funeral homes.
Richard Davi, who brought his Center Gold jewelry company to Middle Country Road from Lindenhurst when he lost his lease in 1999, has been advertising in The Times since the newspaper started. Print works best, said Davi, who buys 52 half-page ads a year. “On radio and television, on the back of the bus, in supermarkets, they don’t have anything tangible in their hands.”
John McQuaid runs the Sylvan Learning Center a few streets down the block, a branch of the tutoring franchise that he and his wife opened three years ago. The Sylvan plan involves personalizing lessons for students from kindergarten to college. “If you look at the demographics, there are a lot of students in that kind of core age range of the kids that we serve.”
The Middle Country school district has an enrollment of 10,400. Stony Brook University is five miles away.
The Times covers the school district well, said McQuaid, who buys 13 spots a year, “so people who read that are interested in school budget, family and schools, and that’s who we’re trying to reach.”
Newspaper as network
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For Roberta Gerold, superintendent of the Middle Country School District, advertising is in the content of the newspaper, not the back pages.
The District, she said, sends out two informational newsletters a year. The Times’ extensive coverage, with reporters at every board meeting and notable school events, keeps parents informed throughout what Gerold described as the third or fourth largest school district on Long Island.
Community newspapers have a responsibility to report accurately, she said, and “if they are not instruments of integrity, they can put little poison pills in the community.”
“We don’t always like the stories The Times of Middle Country prints, but they’re always presented fairly,” Gerold said.
Joan Little – pharmacist, mother of two elementary-school students and president of the Middle Country Parent-Teacher-Student Association – has been fretting about looming teacher assistant layoffs. The cuts would deprive her children, Cameron and Kerrie, of extra classroom help.
As president of the PTSA, Little is up to date about the issue. But other parents who are not directly involved in school organizations rely on The Times for district news, she said.
“I would say that people had to rely on more word of mouth, or they would have to go to PTA meetings, attend board of education meetings,” said Little, about how information was gathered before The Times. “The school district does put out a newsletter almost three or four times a year; in between that people weren’t really getting all of the information, or they might be getting it in bits and pieces.”
The paper fills with with schools coverage around this time of year as tax levies arise and worry renews about the decline in state aid. The rest of the year top stories often come as features about the struggles that define a town’s growth.
Diane Caudullo, president of the Centereach Civic Association for 10 years, recalls one article that turned the community’s eyes toward a fallow swath of land and helped certify her organization’s legitimacy.
She has it saved. It is on page A3 of the August 14, 2008 edition, and is titled “Town grabs Hobbs farm development rights.”
Hobbs farms is an 11-acre tract of land between Middle Country Road and Nicolls Road in Centereach. In the late 1990s the owner, Alfred Hobbs, passed away and left the land to the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Setauket. The church was having difficulty paying the land’s taxes.
Caudullo and the Centereach Civic did not want the land to go to developers, and after some brainstorming, decided it would be a good idea to turn the land back to farm use.
“Little by little the newspaper helped us let people know where we were headed and that Hobbs farm happened to be one of our goals,” she said.
The culmination of the civic association’s efforts came when the Town of Brookhaven bought the land to preserve it, the meat of the article that Caudullo has preserved. It also talks about volunteers and the commitment to the farm.
“The first year we said, ‘We’ll work on a small piece of land, we’ll plant some basics and we’ll see where it takes us,’” Caudullo said. “We had an amazing turnout.”
“The paper sort of let everybody know that we had a civic association,” she said. “And people started to come out of the woodwork and participate.”
Times Reporter Jennifer Choi
