NewsBeat

22 NewsBeat January 2018 lizah Salario has been named arts and entertainment director for NYC-NOW.com. The website serves as a funnel for Straus Media's arts and entertainment coverage in its Manhattan based print newspapers. Our Town, The Eastsider, The West Side Spirit, The Westsider, Our Town Downtown, The Downtowner, The Chelsea News and The Chelsea Clinton News. Salario will also work with local arts groups and individual artists to curate neighborhood events on the site. ohn Anderson has been named managing editor of the Batavia Daily News in New York. Anderson most recently served as a regional editor for GateHouse Media, overseeing the Hornell (N.Y.) Evening Tribune, Wellsville Daily Reporter, Genesee Country Express in Dansville, N.Y. and Sunday Spectacular in Wellsville, N.Y. He also spent nine years as Allegany County bureau chief for the Olean (N.Y.) Times Herald. ob O'Leary has been named vice president of revenue diversification at The Daily Gazette in Schenectady, N.Y. O'Leary briefly served as vice president of advertising for the Gazette in 2013. He later served as publisher and general manager of the Kingston (N.Y.) Daily Freeman. O'Leary began his career as an advertising salesman at the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal. A News People B especially after the White Plains Times, another free weekly, went under last spring. "Adam has a lot of integrity," says Patricia Casey, the former publisher of the White Plains Times and publishing consultant to the White Plains Examiner. "He's a really good person, and he's very smart." His lean-times business model has worked, she believes, because "he doesn't go out in a big way initially. A lot of business models are to grab the entire market and start really big, and I think that's what gets you in trouble in a recession." Casey knows this first-hand. When launching the White Plains Times in 2005, "we went out big and we hit it big. We had the real estate market locked up and everybody jumping to be in the paper." In the fall of 2008, when the economy tanked, revenues from real estate advertisers evaporated, and so did the paper. The Examiner brand, on the other hand, doesn't depend on one advertising category. Stone explains that the economy was starting to slide in the fall of 2007, when they launched, but the recession "wasn't a game changer. It helped that we never relied on those bread-and-butter ad revenue streams that other newspapers did. We didn't lose a heavy volume of real estate or bank or auto ads because we never had them." Instead, he had the local bookstore and gift shops — small businesses that even in hard times could still cough up $50 for a 116th-page black-and-white ad. Like any good entrepreneur, Stone is willing to adapt to a changing marketplace, with his idealism tempered by the realities of change in a constantly shifting media landscape. While he used to bear a grudge against what he perceived as the print- killing digital arena, he has beefed up his once bare bones website, TheExaminerNews.com, with original content, breaking news, and blogs. And at the urging of Chris Cornell, he's become a social media convert who speaks easily of unique visitors and web analytics and how Facebook drives more readers to the website than Twitter. Many say that his competition isn't so much print these days as the growing number of online hyper-local websites, such as AOL's Patch and Main Street Connect, a Connecticut-based online community news company with a growing presence in Westchester County.But Stone doesn't worry about competition, whatever platform it occupies. "All the money in the world can't allow a big media company to execute the basics much better than us or much worse than us," he argues. "All the money in the world doesn't change coverage of a local village board meeting. Their money isn't much of a strategic advantage. It's really more about advertising revenue than competition. We have really good people editorially, and they do their job and they do it well. So then it becomes about the sales reps." He continues: "There are no plans at all for print not to be front and center. The only caveat to all of this is everything's changing so quickly. We have an apparatus in place where, if it made sense, we could become a daily online media outlet yesterday. But what's the purpose of doing that when the market's allowing us to do what we're doing now? People like the newspaper and there's a demand for it. I think we've found a happy medium between print and the web, and we need to do more with that as time moves forward." Maybe then he'll get a real office? "We'll see. Probably not." — Reprinted from WestchesterMagazine.com Adam Stone (Continued from previous page) J

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