Declaring every intention of continuing “to put out a print edition,” the president and publisher of the Baltimore Business Journal, one of 41 weekly newspapers owned by American City Business Journals Inc., told a large gathering of businessmen and women at week’s end that the BBJ is not only turning a healthy profit but has seen a dramatic increase in revenues over the past several years.

“We are positioned to provide you with all the up-to-date information you need” to be competitive in the marketplace, the BBJ publisher, John Dinkel, told a packed conference room Friday at the newspaper’s Inner Harbor headquarters in the former Verizon Building on East Pratt St.

WHAT THE JOURNAL CAN DO

The businesspeople, numbering close to a hundred and including government representatives as well, had come to learn what the Journal can do to give them a leg up on their competition and keep them informed and current on everything that’s going on in the world of industry and business.

One small business owner, Amánda Karfakis, the president and CEO of Vitamin, a seven-employee “design and marketing boutique” that enhances brand perception and is located in Highlandtown, brought half her staff to the early a.m. meeting to see Dinkel and BBJ Editor Joanna Sullivan unveil the Journal’s newest product: a daily aggregation of news stories titled “Morning Edition” — which the Journal describes as “Daily business news essential to Greater Baltimore’s business leaders” — that is being sent out at 7:30 a.m. weekdays via email.

The BBJ also publishes — in addition to its weekly tabloid-style newspaper — a daily online frequently-updated edition and provides subscribers with various newsletters geared to specific industries, such as real estate and sporting news. Its latest entry is the groundbreaking a.m. aggregation of overnight news that goes out to subscribers free of charge first thing in the morning, just as the workday is about to begin.

Sullivan said the Journal is “excited about the prospects” for the new email and has gotten nothing but positive feedback so far.

Despite being a business publication, Dinkel told the group that news about the sports industry — tickets, players, merchandise and memorabilia — was near the top of the list of BBJ stories that online readers have been clicking on.

However the BBJ is not unique in its belief that print-edition newspapers are far from dead. On Friday, a co-founder of Facebook and former Harvard roommate of the social networking giant’s 27-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who is in the process of taking Facebook public — announced he would become the majority owner of the venerable New Republic magazine and immediately assume chores as publisher and editor-in-chief.

Chris Hughes, the new-media guru who five years ago left Facebook to help run the highly successful online organizing machine and social network for then-candidate Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, simultaneously quelled fears he would kill TNR’s print edition, expressing instead surprising support for legacy publication.

The New Republic is known colloquially and affectionally by its adoring readers as TNR.

PRIMARILY A PRINT MAGAZINE

At a time when other magazines like Time and Newsweek are failing and providing fodder for the doom-and-gloomers of print media, Hughes declared The New Republic under his leadership would continue to be primarily a print magazine, although in an interview with the New York Times preceding his announcement he acknowledged the likelihood that in five to ten years, “if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” such as a Kindle, Android or iPad.

In purchasing The New Republic, Hughes, 28, a 2006 Harvard magna with a degree in history and literature, said he was a firm believer in the “future of high-quality long-form journalism” and that he believed traditional magazines and newspapers were a natural fit for electronic tablets.

Founded by political writer Walter Lippman a century ago (in 1914), TNR recently modernized its appearance and downsized from a weekly publication to biweekly. It also has begun charging readers to access some areas of its website while providing other parts free of charge, and has introduced an iPad app.

Still it has regularly lost money in recent years. But Hughes says “profit per se” is not his motive.

“The reason I’m getting involved here is that I believe in the type of vigorous contextual journalism that… we in general as a society need.”

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, 28, took control of the liberal New Republic magazine this week, promising to con- tinue it as a print edition — but most likely for Kindles and other tablets.

In “A Letter to TNR Readers” on the magazine’s website, tnr.com, Hughes declares: “It seems that today too many media institutions chase superficial metrics of online virality at the expense of investing in rigorous reporting and analysis of the most important stories of our time….

“Many of us get our news from social networks, blogs, and daily aggregators,” he continues.

“The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism. But as we’ve seen with the rise of tablets and mobile reading devices, it is an ever-shifting landscape — one that I believe now offers opportunities to reinvigorate the forms of journalism that examine the challenges of our time in all their complexity. Although the method of delivery of important ideas has undergone drastic change over the past 15 years, the hunger for them has not dissipated.

“In the next era of The New Republic, we will aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism.”

TNR has traditionally run contrary to conventional wisdom. With a small staff and circulation of less than 50,000 it has historically had enormous influence as an integral part of the liberal movement and has been read by presidents including John F. Kennedy and others, and counts among its contributors some of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

Kennedy also famously read the Baltimore Sun at the beginning of every workday, a newspaper which, not unlike most other legacy publications, has been hard hit financially by the Internet boom, including social media such as Facebook and Twitter — which is where most young people are believed today to be getting their news — along with online sites like the Drudge Report, a news aggregation website run by conservative Matt Drudge.

SOURCES IN THE KNOW

Charm City sources considered to be in the know tell Voice of Baltimore the Sun is one of the few Chicago Tribune properties not operating in the red — and in fact the Sun is currently hiring new reporters — but it is light years from the financial behemoth it was when independently owned by the A.S. Abell Co.

The Tribune has yet to emerge from bankruptcy.

In recent months The Sun instituted a paywall charging subscribers to read online content, offering special subscription price incentives to those having the print edition delivered to their place of work or home.

The New York Times also charges readers for online content, as does the Wall Street Journal and Maryland Daily Record, leading such local news outlets as WBFF-Fox45-TV to advertise proudly that all its news content is available to Maryland-area viewers “free of charge.”
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
Editor’s Note:  Voice of Baltimore works with the Baltimore Business Journal to put together BBJ’s groundbreaking Morning Edition daily news aggregation.