NewsBeat

April 2020 NewsBeat 23 Jim Fogler named President and CEO of Florida Press Association and Intersect Media Solutions T By KEN TINGLEY ALLAHASSEE, FL – Jim Fogler, a veteran leader in the publishing industry, is the new president and chief executive officer of the Florida Press Association and Intersect Media Solutions. In a career that spanned more than 30 years with Gannett Co., Inc, Fogler most recently served as the president and regional sales director for the Poughkeepsie Journal, the oldest newspaper in N ew York, and the Burlington Free Press, Vermont's largest paper. He had served on NYPA's board of directors. Fogler has worked at Gannett newspapers throughout the northeast, including the Ithaca Journal, where he was President and Publisher, and Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, where he was Vice President of Marketing and Communications. Fogler is a graduate of East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania with a degree in media communications and technology. Fogler's appointment is effective immediately and he and his family will be relocating to central Florida with his wife, Allison, eleven-year-old son, Andrew, and daughter, Alexandra. We had a group visit us in January to learn about the newspaper. I t was a great opportunity for us to talk about what we do, how we do it and why it is important to have a daily newspaper in your community. There were 25 or so attending as part of a leadership class. It's an annual meeting for us. When it was my turn to talk, I took a little bit different approach than in the past. I talked about a recent study I read that any community member should find alarming. According to a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina, 1,800 local newspapers have closed or merged since 2004. The same forces that are closing retail department stores and challenging malls to stay open are also working against newspapers. Newspaper advertising continues to recede as more and more people do their shopping online. The big stores that used to spend a lot of money advertising in the newspaper are closing, and we are losing their advertising. As advertising revenue declines, so do our resources to do good journalism. I talked to the leadership group about the journalism we have done over the last two decades and how it has made a difference. I talked about our underage drinking series, the abuse of opioids reporting, suicide and domestic violence. I talked about holding schools and governments accountable to taxpayers. I believe that journalism has helped to make our communities a better place to live. But what I told them they really needed to worry about was the impact that less journalism has on a community. Various studies found that in communities where a newspaper closed, civic engagement dropped, fewer people voted, fewer people could identify who the candidates were in local elections and what their positions were on the issues. No one else is doing this type of daily reporting. Another study found that borrowing costs for cities and towns when they are building bridges, DPW garages and municipal buildings rose when there was no newspaper to hold local government accountable. Communities where the newspaper remained did not see that rise in costs. One of the University of North Carolina researchers found that news organizations often set the agenda of public debate by bringing particular issues to the public's attention. Without the news organizations doing that, many issues were simply not addressed. Even for the news organizations like our own that have not closed, there have been dramatic reductions in workforce. That means fewer stories, less in-depth journalism, smaller sized papers and more costly subscriptions. It was a good audience. They nodded and shook their heads in all the right places and genuinely showed concern about what a community like Glens Falls might look like without a robust daily newspaper. At the end of the meeting, our circulation manager asked how many of the people in the room had a print subscription. One person raised their hand. Ken Tingley is the editor of The Post-Star and may be reached via email at tingley@poststar.com. His blog "The Front Page" discusses issues about newspapers and journalism. You can also follow him on Twitter at www.twutter.com/kentingley.

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