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The Herald-Sun (Durham, North Carolina)
Encyclopedia
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
in Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
, published by the Paxton Media Group
Paxton Media Group
Paxton Media Group of Paducah, Kentucky, is a privately held media company with holdings that include newspapers and a TV station, WPSD-TV in Paducah. David M. Paxton is president and CEO....
of Paducah, Kentucky
Paducah, Kentucky
Paducah is the largest city in Kentucky's Jackson Purchase Region and the county seat of McCracken County, Kentucky, United States. It is located at the confluence of the Tennessee River and the Ohio River, halfway between the metropolitan areas of St. Louis, Missouri, to the west and Nashville,...
.
History
The Herald-Sun began publication on 1 January 1991 as the result of a merger of The Durham Morning Herald and The Durham Sun.The Herald-Sun and The Durham Morning Herald before they were owned and operated by the Rollins Family, which had been in management positions since 1895. Edward Tyler Rollins Jr., former owner, board chairman and publisher of The Herald-Sun, died 5 November 2006, just shy of two years after selling to Paxton Media Group.
Early history
The Durham Morning Herald began publication in 1893, as a result of the reorganization of The Durham Globe from a daily to a weekly paper. Four former employees of the downsized Globe, itself an outgrowth of the merger of Durham's first daily, The Tobacco Plant and The Durham Daily Recorder, organized a competitor newspaper, The Globe Herald, which would soon be renamed The Morning Herald.In 1929, the Durham Morning Herald Company acquired The Durham Sun, an evening daily that had been in publication in one form or another since 1889.
Merger
The late Rick Kaspar was the first person outside of the Rollins Family to run the century-old newspaper. He was recruited by the Rollins Family to make changes and bring the company into the 21st century of newspaper publishing. In 1991, he successfully merged the Durham Herald Co.'s two daily papers to form The Herald Sun. "Rick was devoted to his family, to his community and to his newspaper," noted Durham Herald Co. Chairman E.T. Rollins Jr.Acquisition by Paxton Media Group
On 3 December 2004, The Durham Herald Co., the parent company of The Herald Sun and The Chapel Hill Herald announced that Paxton Media Group had purchased the company from the locally based Rollins family. The sum paid by Paxton was not publicly announced (the two companies are both privately held), but sources placed it at about $124 million. Pre-sale appraisals of the company had placed its value at roughly $70 million.First downsizing and reorganization
Upon assumption of operations, on 3 January 2005 Paxton's executives fired 81 of the newspaper's approximately 350 employees, including president and publisher David Hughey and longtime executive editor, vice-president Bill Hawkins, longtime columnist Jim Wise, longtime sports writer and Atlantic Coast ConferenceAtlantic Coast Conference
The Atlantic Coast Conference is a collegiate athletic league in the United States. Founded in 1953 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the ACC sanctions competition in twenty-five sports in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association for its twelve member universities...
authority Al Featherston and editorial cartoonist John Cole, who eight months earlier had taken first place in the 22nd annual John Fischetti
John Fischetti
John R. Fischetti was an editorial cartoonist for the New York Herald-Tribune and the Chicago Daily News. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1969 and numerous awards from the National Cartoonists Society.- Biography :Born in Brooklyn, New York, where his Italian father was a...
Editorial Cartoon Competition.
The firings were unexpected and abrupt, many employees being told they were fired upon returning from lunch, and then being escorted to the parking lot. The new editor, Bob Ashley said the job cuts were made because of financial reasons He explained that fired employees were escorted from the building immediately due to security concerns and on the advice of the company's lawyers.
Second downsizing and reorganization
On July 30, 2008 Herald-Sun editor Bob Ashley announced a new round of staff layoffs and content reductions, citing the paper's poor revenues and admitting that the quality and quantity of the information presented in The Herald-Sun was not satisfying readers. Ashley also noted that a number of stand-alone feature sections would be consolidated into a nonetheless reduced metro section and that overall article length would be reduced, while the number of informational graphics and informational sidebars would increase, a move that appears to signal a further reduction in the depth of local and national reporting. According to Ashley, the shorter article length, along with the recent reassignment of two staffers to news reporting will increase local coverage, much like similarly promised increases in local reporting that followed on the heels of Paxton's earlier staff cuts at the Herald-Sun.Third downsizing and reorganization
On May 15, 2009 there was yet another reduction that included seven members of the newsroom staff among others.Controversy
Jim Cooney, Reade Seligmann's lawyer in the Duke lacrosse case2006 Duke University lacrosse team scandal
The Duke lacrosse case is a common name given to a criminal investigation into a 2006 false accusation of rape made against three members of the men's lacrosse team at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina...
, named The Herald-Sun in a press conference that was televised live on many national news networks on April 11, 2007. Saying that The Herald-Sun is one of the major "cowards" of the case, Cooney stated that The Herald-Sun empowered Nifong to go forward with a weak case by not "bother[ing] to stand up and demand proper processes [and] the presumption of innocence," while "publishing what they knew were lies, and repeating them." The Herald-Sun also came under fire for have "not written a single editorial critical of the way in which Mike Nifong proceeded" at the time the North Carolina Attorney General declared the defendants "innocent." This occurred despite the fact that the North Carolina State Bar had filed two rounds of ethics charges against him, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys demanded that Nifong remove himself from the case, and many other news organizations demanded that the district attorney step down.
Awards
The Herald-Sun won nine awards in the 2009 North Carolina Press Association contest. The paper won General Excellence in its circulation category. The Herald-Sun received first-place awards for sports photography, serious columns and news section design in its circulation division. It also received second place for best use of an interactive features on its Web site; and third place in news enterprise and investigative reporting, general news photography, criticism, and appearance and design.Web site
The Herald-Sun's websiteWebsite
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
was first launched in 1995 as a basic online information site, with relatively little dynamic content from the print edition of the newspaper. Despite the basic offerings, the site won a Newspaper Association of America
Newspaper Association of America
The Newspaper Association of America is a trade association representing approximately 2000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. Member newspapers represented by the NAA include large daily papers, non-daily and small-market publications, as well as digital and multiplatform...
Digital Edge Award for its online guide to local and national candidates during the 1996 elections
United States elections, 1996
The 1996 United States general elections were held on November 5. Bill Clinton was re-elected as President of the United States, while the Republicans maintained their majorities in both houses of the United States Congress....
.
On 7 November 2000, heraldsun.com was relaunched as a dynamic news site with content drawn directly from the print edition, wire services, as well as updates and features on local news stories during the course of the day. As of June 2003, the site was receiving more than 3 million page views per month and had been honored more than seven times for its design and innovation.
Changes under Paxton Media Group
Following the newspaper's purchase by the Paxton Media Group in 2005, the website was dramatically pared back, as a majority of the ITInformation technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
staff and many of the newspaper's local content providers were dismissed in the mass firings of 3 January 2005. Apart from an automated feed of AP
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
wire stories, the site was no longer updated during the day, even during the course of major local and national events.
A redesign of the site, in early 2007, made an effort to de-emphasize the AP-wire feed headlines, which were no longer placed at the top of the page. The redesign also introduced compulsory, free, registration for users wishing to read any article, including the AP-wire feed stories.
In 2009, the Web site technology was outsourced to Matchbin Inc., but it is still managed by staff at The Herald-Sun.
Circulation
The Herald-Sun's geographic emphasis is on the western counties of the Research TriangleThe Triangle (North Carolina)
The Research Triangle, also known as Raleigh-Durham and commonly referred to as simply "The Triangle", is a region in the Piedmont of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by North Carolina State University, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and cities of...
area of North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
that surround the City of Durham
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
and the Town of Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...
, including Durham County
Durham County, North Carolina
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 223,314 people, 89,015 households, and 54,032 families residing in the county. The population density was 769 people per square mile . There were 95,452 housing units at an average density of 329 per square mile...
, Orange County
Orange County, North Carolina
Orange County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2010 census, the population was 133,801. Its county seat is Hillsborough...
, Person County
Person County, North Carolina
Person County is a county located in the Piedmont region in north-central North Carolina in the United States. It is part of the Durham-Chapel Hill Metropolitan Area. The population was 39,464 at the 2010 census.The county seat is Roxboro...
, Granville County
Granville County, North Carolina
-Demographics:As of the census of 2010, there were 59,916 people in 20,628 households residing in the county. The population density was 111.6 people per square mile . There were 22,827 housing units at an average density of 42.5 per square mile...
and Chatham County
Chatham County, North Carolina
Chatham County is a county located in the Piedmont area of the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of 2000, the population was 49,329. Its county seat is Pittsboro.-History:...
.
Since Paxton Media Group's assumption of the Herald Sun’s operations, on January 4, 2005, circulation has steadily and rapidly declined. Between 1 January and 31 March 2008, the paper was estimated to reach less than 20 percent of households in Durham and Orange counties, its primary subscriber base. Furthermore, having lost 10.8 percent of its weekday subscribers between March 2007 and March 2008, the Herald-Sun suffered the largest circulation loss of any daily newspaper in North Carolina, and was only one of two that lost more than 6 percent, the other being High Point's
High Point, North Carolina
High Point is a city located in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina. As of 2010 the city had a total population of 104,371, according to the US Census Bureau. High Point is currently the eighth-largest municipality in North Carolina....
Paxton-owned Enterprise
High Point Enterprise
High Point Enterprise is a daily morning newspaper that primarily serves High Point, North Carolina.The newspaper's coverage area includes parts of Guilford, Davidson, Randolph and Forsyth counties in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. The Enterprise is owned by Paxton Media Group...
. By comparison, the Herald Sun’s primary market competitor, the Raleigh News and Observer lost less than one percent of its daily subscribers in the same period.
| Weekday | Saturday | Sunday | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2003 | 50,612 | 56,363 | |
| 2004 | |||
| 2005 | 42,298 | 39,835 | 45,793 |
| 2006 | |||
| 2007 | 36,050 | 30,637 | 36,513 |
| 2008 | 29,449 | 24,965 | 30,192 |
| 2009 | 25,111 | 25,111 | 28,038 |
| 2010 | 25,080 | 25,080 | 28,246 |