Editorial: Throwing its employees under the bus, Kerrville Daily Times whines about lost revenue to City Council

If you ever wanted a cringeworthy moment in a public setting, leave it to The Kerrville Daily Times representative to deliver the goods when they were better served to keep quiet. 

But the Kerrville Daily Times’ owner — Southern Newspapers — was determined to go down swinging and may have accomplished striking out thanks to a tone-deaf and entitled speech by one of the company’s executives during Tuesday night’s Kerrville City Council meeting. 

After losing about $25,000 in annual revenue thanks to grossly overbidding for the city of Kerrville’s public notices, Southern Newspapers Vice President Neice Bell proceeded to throw The Daily Times employees under the bus, accuse the City Council of ulterior motives and then tried to dispel rumors that the newspaper was financially troubled while confirming those woes on the record. 

“We messed up,” Bell told the City Council about the public notices failure. “The lady who was doing it didn’t understand what she was doing.” 

For those unaware, the state requires municipalities and other governmental organizations to publish a wide range of legal notices in a printed newspaper. What defines print is hotly contested in the age of digital delivery, but in this antiquated context, it means printed on paper. For many newspapers, it’s a reliable source of income, and the Texas Publishers Association fights fiercely to protect it in the legislature. 

In this instance, the City Council unanimously gave the Hill Country Community Journal the public notice contract. Before succumbing to the newspaper industry’s challenges, the Kerrville Daily Times locked up this business because of its six-day publication schedule. Those days are over. 

However, Bell’s moralistic lecturing of the City Council about transparency raised our eyebrows. Offering a dose of conspiracy-fueled shaming, Bell  suggested that leaders had something to hide by sending public notices to a “smaller publication.” 

“The greater reach provides the taxpayers with the greatest transparency,” she said. “Transparency leads to trust and trust is probably the most essential ingredient to community leadership and community service. Obviously, when a community entity chooses to publish notices in a smaller publication, they give the appearance of attempting to hide their actions, and that destroys public trust.”

Let’s be clear: Under Southern Newspapers’ watch, The Kerrville Daily Times languishes journalistically, abdicating its watchdog role, especially over the last two years, to others. When you rely on public notices to do your work for you, that’s a problem. While heralded as an innovator, Southern offers abysmal working conditions built on a troubled industry’s worst and most dated practices. 

In recent months, the newspaper has lost reporters, salespeople, editors and publishers. It doesn’t take an expert of any weight to see that the newspaper’s revenue is down due to a lack of advertising. Other financial cracks are present.

The newspaper closed its printing press last year, with Bell complaining that they couldn’t get parts for the 65-year-old press but never admitting they didn’t do much to keep it up through the years. The newspaper sold its Quinlan Street property, most certainly bolstering Southern’s bottom line, and moved its offices to the former Wells Fargo bank on Junction Highway. 

Bell compounds the problem by trying to shame the city by holding out the newspaper’s place as one of the city’s oldest continuously run businesses. Still, it’s been on a downward slide since hometown owner Bill Dozier sold it in the 1980s when newspaper chains bought up small papers for staggering sums, often based on $1 million or more for every thousand subscribers. 

“If the issue is motivated by anything other than cost please remember the Kerrville Times has worked very closely with the city for over 120 years,” she said. “Not only is our print product delivered to more homes than anyone else in Kerrville, from June of last year to June of this year we had over two million page views and 427,000 unique users on our website.”

Those numbers are dubious and stink of entitlement. It is typical of many legacy businesses, run by those who think they deserve a pass to year-over-year revenue. However, that should never guarantee immortal reverence to your enterprise. 

“And just for the record, despite what others are saying, rumors that are being spread and out and out lies being told, we are not going out business,” Bell said. 

Uh, sorry. You made a pretty good argument that the days of The Kerrville Daily Times are indeed troubled and potentially numbered, thanks to the stewardship of Southern Newspapers.