BC Business
David Black doesn’t fit the mould of the typical press baron. No knighthoods, no mansions in Florida, no London office towers. The soft-spoken UBC grad operates out of an office in Victoria, where he and his family have lived since moving from Williams Lake in 1985.
But with the recent acquisition of a second U.S. daily paper, the 60-year-old founder and president of Black Press Ltd. – who, it must be said, is not related to Conrad Black – is finding it increasingly difficult to fly under the radar.
Today, Black Press owns more than 100 newspapers and 17 printing operations. Black’s latest foray into the U.S. culminated with the purchase in June of the Akron Beacon Journal for US$165 million. That opportunity came as the result of a shake-up in the U.S. publishing industry, when California-based McClatchy Co. bought Knight Ridder last spring and immediately put 12 of the chain’s 32 operations on the market. Prior to snapping up the Akron paper, Black had bid unsuccessfully on two Philadelphia dailies and a group of weeklies published by the Boston Herald.
The Akron purchase caps a history of seizing opportunities as they arise. After completing an engineering degree at UBC and an MBA at the University of Western Ontario, Black got his start in publishing as a business analyst at the Toronto company that would become Torstar. He was lured back west in 1975 when he bought the Williams Lake Tribune from his father.
At the time, settling in to the life of a small-town publisher was all that was on Black’s horizon. But the opportunities kept presenting themselves. First a paper in Ashcroft came calling, asking if Black was interested in buying. “I couldn’t figure out how I could possibly buy it, let alone manage it from that far away, so I said no,” Black recalls. “But a couple of years later they convinced me, and that kind of worked.” Next it was Smithers on the phone, and that call led to another purchase that “kind of worked.”
“I began to understand that if you buy papers within a certain geographic area and put them on your press, you’re going to make more money,” Black explains. “It kept happening over and over.”
Within 10 years, Black had run out of growing room in the Interior, so he set up shop in Victoria and began building what is today a string of 21 Vancouver Island community newspapers. Black continued adding to his holdings, sometimes one at a time and sometimes in clusters, as in 1987 when he bought a group of Washington state community papers, and in 1997, when he acquired 33 newspapers in Western Canada, including Alberta’s Red Deer Advocate, his first daily.
Black got his first U.S. daily in 2000, when he pounced on the opportunity to buy the Honolulu Star Bulletin as the result of an antitrust ruling. The two publishers in town, Gannett and Liberty Newspaper, had brokered a cosy agreement to shut down one of the two papers they operated jointly. When the courts nixed that agreement, the Star Bulletin went on the market, free to anyone foolish enough to go up against the remaining Gannett paper. The Star Bulletin has since thrived under Black’s ownership, growing its circulation each year.
Skeptics say that Black is fanning the dying glow of a sunset industry. But he remains an unrepentant newspaperman, and anticipates further growth, most likely south of the border. “It appears I’m more of a believer in the newspaper industry today than Wall Street or a lot of folks in the States,” he says, “so perhaps there will be others that come available that we can afford.” As for opportunities closer to home, a third Vancouver daily is not in the cards. Asked whether he foresees competing with Canwest in Vancouver, Black replies, “I don’t think so. They’ve got it pretty much locked up with two dailies combined.” Seems even the modern-day saviour of the printed word knows a lost cause when he sees one.