How an Ohio newspaper sank a BC publishing empire

Photos: (left) Black Press’s original community newspapers catered to readers and advertisers in small British Columbia towns 📷 Tyler Olsen / (right) The Akron Beacon Journal headquarters in Akron, Ohio. 📷 Warren LeMay/Flickr/Creative Commons

In 2006, Black Press was BC’s largest publisher of community newspapers. It owned a daily in Alberta. And I was just starting my newspaper career with one of the company’s papers. As I learned how to write a story and take a photo, Black Press owner David Black was doing what made him rich: he was looking to buy another newspaper.

But driven by ambition, this one would be bigger than any he had bought before. But Black’s big bet would end up going sour in ways that are only now becoming clear—and which will influence the future of community institutions in the Fraser Valley and beyond for years to come.

This is how a quest to turn a small-town newspaper empire into a continental behemoth backfired, and how the fate of Black Press was determined not in Williams Lake or Abbotsford, but in a gritty industrial Ohioan town.

A full declaration of my conflict of interests for this story would be the story of much of my adult life. So we’ll keep this as brief as possible. My first work experience week in high school was at the Black Press-owned newspaper in my hometown of Vernon, BC. My first post-university newspaper job was at the same paper. I returned to Black Press in 2014, when it acquired the second paper I worked at: the Chilliwack Times. The company then transferred me to work at the Abbotsford News, another of its titles. I wasn’t enthusiastic about that move, I was less happy when the company closed down the Times, and I was heartbroken when personal tragedy struck former co-workers pushed out of jobs. I left Black Press unhappy with the company’s direction. Today, I operate an ostensible competitor to Black Press, though we actually rely on its reporters’ local news-gathering operations to help inform our readers through our Need To Know section. I consider many people still employed by the company to be friends and want them to stay employed. I love newspapers.

But somebody should write in depth about what led a BC paper chain with continental ambitions to end up filing for creditor protection this week. And if history is any indication, it’s possible nobody will. So here’s what happened. All the facts here are either a matter of public record and broadly known or come directly from personal observation.

In the beginning, there was a paper in Williams Lake

Black Press’s current troubles are, broadly, not caused by how Black Press ran its newspapers in Chilliwack and Langley and Abbotsford and dozens of other small and medium-sized communities across British Columbia. This is not a story about how the things that annoyed or angered me or others came back to force Black Press into the humiliation of creditor protection. It’s not, really, about anything I or other reporters saw or experienced or loved or hated about the company.

That’s all small-town stuff. And if Black Press had remained a small-town company that simply owned dozens of small newspapers across the province, it wouldn’t be in the position it is in today.

Instead, this is a story about ambition and a desire to be better and bigger than BC’s dominant community newspaper chain. This is a story about how a good business strategy can become a bad business strategy in the matter of a few years. And this is a story about Akron, Ohio.

But before we get to the $100 million bet that went wrong, we should go back to the start. To one man’s journey from Toronto to Williams Lake.