Merger Means Circulation Overhaul for Local Papers

(For the annual list of newspaper circulation, click here.) 

Newspaper circulation in Northwest Arkansas changed forever on Nov. 1.

That was the first day subscribers got a look at their newspapers as delivered by Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC, the result of the merger of Stephens Media LLC and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc.

Given one of the most unenviable tasks involved with the new operation was circulation director Hector Cueva. His charge essentially boiled down to figuring out the best way to deliver five different newspapers within a two-county area.

“We had been through this before, so I had a very clear picture of what was going to happen,” Cueva said.

What happened wasn’t always pleasant. Cueva and three of his managers fielded hundreds of calls from subscribers.

Some calls centered on the new product resulting from the merger. Others were from readers receiving different products.

While Democrat-Gazette subscribers had been receiving the Northwest Arkansas Times and Benton County Daily Record, based on their ZIP code, Morning News subscribers were added to the mix. A Morning News subscriber in Fayetteville, for example, no longer could get that publication through traditional circulation methods.

Cueva also was busy trying to merge carrier routes, another process he’d experienced when the Times and Daily Record previously went under the Democrat-Gazette umbrella. This time, it was even more painstaking.

“As far as 30 days after the merger, if you and your next-door neighbor had subscribed to different papers, we might still have been using two different carriers to deliver those papers,” Cueva said, adding it took almost two months to fully merge the routes. “You can’t imagine the amount of resources we were using to deliver those papers.”

Add the concerns of advertisers, and Cueva found himself operating in a pressure-cooker environment despite his understanding of the realities of the situation.

“Everybody wanted it done in a few weeks,” he said, “and I knew that wasn’t logistically possible.”

The result was Cueva and many of his 90 staff members working 12- to 16-hour shifts, sometimes 7 days a week. Cueva said he worked every day from Nov. 1 through Christmas Eve.

“I finally took a day off on Christmas,” he said with a laugh, “and I think the day after Christmas, too.”

It’s a smoother process these days, though Cueva said it might be months before “we’re back to normal.”

It also appears too early to get a legitimate read on how circulation has been affected, or trended, since the merger. The most recent figures Cueva had available were six-month, unaudited numbers, and because there no longer is a reason to differentiate between Democrat-Gazette and Morning News subscribers, an apples-to-apples comparison is practically impossible.

The six-month totals show an average daily circulation rate (Monday-Friday) for the Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest Arkansas edition of 49,226 and a Sunday rate of 58,156. That spans from Oct. 1-March 31.

“The numbers are skewed,” Cueva said. “They’re a little lower than they could have been because there’s one month without the Morning News figures in there.”

The Democrat-Gazette’s statewide circulation, meanwhile, showed a dip of less than 1 percent on Sunday and an increase of almost 4 percent in average daily rate.

How the join effort in Northwest Arkansas fares remains to be seen, but Cueva is hopeful. He believes most subscribers now have a better understanding of the process and products, and the accompanying challenges of “producing five different newspapers, basically from scratch, every day.”

“It’s like asking Ford to build a new model every week,” Cueva said. “It’s just not easy.”