New life for an ailing paper

Nearly three years ago I ventured into purchasing my second newspaper with the News Enterprise in West Concord. I had high hopes of turning around what had been a struggling newspaper in many ways. From the start we completed a major overhaul of the newspaper, including redesigning the pages, adding full color to many pages, increasing news and sports coverage and improving writing and photography. Since 2012, we even won many state awards for journalistic excellence. Despite our best efforts to provide a quality newspaper to our friends on the western side of the county, the most important part never materialized—increasing readership. It has become one of those pesky, nagging problems I have endured while owning the News Enterprise. Sadly, the circulation of the News Enterprise has actually dropped over the past three years. Though we have won some big awards, we have become one of the smallest in the state in terms of circulation.Opportunity came knocking this past summer when I was offered to purchase the Dodge County Independent from the Carlsen family. I took over the DCI in July, providing me with a perfect scenario to merge the News Enterprise into the larger DCI. This will become a reality starting in November. The goal is to provide an even larger newspaper that will give readers and advertisers more value. Taking two newspapers in the same county and making it one can accomplish this goal.Newspaper mergers have become prevalent in recent years. It shouldn’t be totally foreign to our friends on the west edge of the county as the News Enterprise went through a merger a number of years ago when the Claremont News merged with the West Concord Enterprise.In this particular case with the DCI, it will allow us to streamline our resources, provide a better overall product and offer advertisers a product that reaches more people. We want people to view this as something positive for the communities of Claremont, Dodge Center and West Concord. We are not abandoning any of those cities. In fact, much will remain the same as we will continue with a full-time reporter just as we have for the past three years. The only real difference will be that the news and sports pages will be merged into the DCI. There will be unlimited opportunities with the new combined paper.The alternative would have been to leave at least two of the towns that make up the Triton School District without a newspaper. That would have been a travesty for those communities, especially since they have had a community newspaper for more than a century. With the DCI and the upcoming merger, we are now in a better position to serve all Dodge County residents well into the future.  Over the next month, we will be working feverishly and going in hot pursuit of providing an even better product than ever before for readers of both papers. That’s our promise to you.