By Jim Kilgore
I remember as a child going to The Packet with my father on weekends. I was in awe of him. He was the owner of The Packet and ran Dow Jones and Company, publisher of the very successful Wall Street Journal which my father, Barney Kilgore, guided to growth, success and national recognition.
At The Packet office I often watched as my father plopped down at a chair next to an old Royal typewriter, perched on a news desk, where he proceeded to bang out a memo or two to Ed Burke, who was his editor then. The typewriter rattled like a machine gun as Barney fired off one of his famous memos.
He didn’t tell me what he was doing but I knew it was important. I could tell my father was at home at the newspaper. He loved newspapers and the whole process of publishing one — the story writing, editing, composing, printing and delivery. He was like an excited, expectant parent seeing his paper come off the new offset press line he bought for The Packet. His eyes would gleam like a proud father.
Somehow that joy of working at a newspaper rubbed off on me, like the ink that rubs off a newspaper. At first I was not sure if I wanted to enter the family publishing business. I was a sophomore in college when my father died of cancer and though I had worked summers at The Packet writing stories and doing other tasks I was not sure whether I wanted one day to run the family business.
After college, then obtaining an MBA, I decided to work at a daily newspaper for a period of time to see if ink truly flowed in my veins. I traveled across the country, spoke to a lot of newspaper people and after a short military obligation I was offered a job at Gannett working for the company’s newspaper group in Westchester County, New York.
I was a reporter and an advertising sales representative and took on a few other assignments at two of Gannett’s daily newspapers in the northern New York City suburbs. I enjoyed writing and selling ads but I knew after three years at Gannett that I really wanted to be in newspaper management.
That opportunity came when The Packet’s general manager at the time became seriously ill and I was asked by the family to come back to Princeton to work at and then later run The Packet. I spent time as an advertising sales representative, then as an editor, business manager, general manager and then publisher.
I loved the business because it was fun and I knew from my previous work that a local newspaper was critical to the community that it served.
Newspaper publishing is a business, but it is also a community service endeavor. The greatest reward of being in journalism is not the bottom line that the publication produces but the waiting line an editorial or news story produces at the voting booth. What I mean to say is that publishing a quality newspaper is in part a public trust, an obligation to provide a critical community service.
A newspaper, no matter how it is delivered or in what form, print or digital, is that educating and cementing force that gives a neighborhood a better sense of community. The newspaper helps to point out both the strengths and weaknesses of our communities so local residents can come together and make changes to make those communities even better places to live. That is the mission of community journalism.
When I became publisher of The Packet and its sister newspapers in 1980, the operation was fairly small but growing at about 5 percent a year in sales and made a very modest profit. From 1980 to 1990 the organization grew rapidly, with back-to-back years of 25 percent revenue growth. We added newspapers to the Packet flag and continued to expand, win many awards and were recognized in our industry across the country as a high quality, innovative company.
Our newspaper group grew to 13 publications with more than $14 million in sales at the peak in 2004. The Packet was a very valuable franchise. I had many offers to sell the company at very high prices. But I declined to sell. I was not in this for the money.
The business then became challenged by changes in its reader base, and though an early adapter to digital publishing in 1996, in recent years The Packet found it hard to compete with multiple, larger and free or low-priced digital advertising options. Our communities became more diverse, something that added vitality to our communities. But the sense of knowing one’s neighbor was replaced with a sense of suburbia where communities blurred together or dramatically changed with fewer long-time residents and families with deep roots still living within our towns.
Our business struggled in recent years and I was loathe to close or merge newspapers that had been part of our communities for more than 100 years. I was attached to the business, our communities and our employees who were like family to me. It was much easier for me to build a business than to tear it apart.
But more recently economics forced The Packet to restructure several times with more recent steps to merge publications from 12 to five while maintaining our circulation.
So we became smaller but made the necessary adjustments to serve our communities within the more limited resources available to us. Further, earlier this year, I made the decision to merge The Packet with a larger publishing organization to realize more efficiencies and to provide more product cross-selling opportunities.
Part of that decision included the realization that I no longer wanted to have the full responsibility of operating The Packet since the business had greatly changed and running a local publishing venture today is more about meeting budget than providing great community service. It is just a reality because the first job of a business is to stay in business. So you retrench but then develop ways to reinvent yourself to grow in different ways.
So over the past few months I have been phasing out of operating the day to day business of The Packet and have taken a lesser role but still keeping my hands somewhat in the operation while new leadership takes over.
I have worked at The Packet for 40 years but I will never plan to retire and have always had other business and community service interests. I will continue to pursue those. But my true love is community publishing. That ink that rubbed off on me at an early age soon flowed in my veins and that ink will flow until father time decides it’s time for that flow of ink to cease.
