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print thisAbout Broad Street Community Newspapers
The start of a new trend…
In October of 1973, the Centenary Methodist Church in Berlin, N.J., called Jeanne Smith to ask a favor of her. They wanted to start a church bulletin and make sure that everyone in the community was aware of the local news, events and general happenings. The church had heard that Smith had had some prior experience in college with news writing, and thought she’d be the right woman to ask.
The Bulletin Community News was released that month, as the current local community newspaper, the Record Breeze, seemed to seldom cover Berlin and its events. The church group, under the direction of Smith, produced an 8 1/2-by-11 inch newsletter and began to circulate it throughout the Berlin community.
Smith produced the newsletter with the old-fashioned cut-and-paste methods, and it included, as planned, community news and events for Berlin. Within two months, the paper covered five local towns.
After one-and-a-half years, this Bulletin Community News changed over to a tabloid-style newspaper and was renamed The Journal Newspaper. Still owned and operated by Smith, the paper then was named the legal newspaper of 15 communities and had a strong, paid-subscription base of readership.
Smith had 21 years overall with the successful, and well accepted, Journal. The paper had branched out, by 1985, to a group of small weeklies in Berlin. However, it was at that time that some of Smith’s ad representatives asked for more.
Claiming that Voorhees was hard to sell to for ad space in the Journal, the ad reps requested a separate edition for Voorhees.
Smith said that, while walking along the beach in Wildwood, N.J., on a summer vacation, her husband spurred the start of the Trend with one simple question: “Why not give it to them?”
That very week, Smith created a proto-type, had it printed by her company and wandered the sample around to merchants in the area. From there, in 1985, Smith started up the “trend of Voorhees.” With a lowercase “t” in the title, the new publication caught on like wildfire in the township of Voorhees.
According to Smith, “Everybody advertised in it; everybody read it,” which prompted the new publication’s slogan, “Everybody reads trend.”
At the start, the trend of Voorhees was a news magazine. It covered planning meetings, school boards, zoning and community news and local happenings. It was a 70/30 split, editorial to advertising.
Later, Smith launched new zones including the “trend of Evesham” and the “trend of Cherry Hill.” By then, the news had become more of a 50/50 split with ads. The trends, in all zones, were free and were mailed directly to readership’s homes, as they are today.
The paper was well read and very popular in the community, as no similar product was then available. The pages, from 1985 to 1994, according to Smith, sometimes numbered in the 80s. It was a large, well-received paper.
A reporter, Sharon VanDyke, who began writing with Smith in 1986 and continues to this day to work on a freelance basis with The Trends, agreed. She said that The Trends of Smith’s day were “community news, with more news and more legal [ads].” Today, she described the content to be more advertising, with no legal ads and less news.
Times of change
In 1994, prior to an attempt to launch a fourth zone into a trend of Cherry Hill East, The Trend papers were sold to Ed McCartney.
Claiming that the sale was not a great financial benefit, as the company had some trouble with finances at the time, McCartney took the helm in 1994 with three zones then in place.
According to Smith, McCartney kept the community news concept and 50/50 split for a very short time, changing soon after the sale to a shopper magazine. She said that this was a time for a large community shift in attitude toward the paper, as the citizens favored a community news feel.
McCartney described the former Trends, as owned by Smith, to be of a circulation around 10,000 and with a sporadic frequency of delivery. Upon taking the lead of the company, McCartney changed the publication to a weekly product, and over time, grew the circulation to near its present-day numbers. (For more detailed growth and change of the coverage areas, please see maps in the final pages of this report.)
At the time of purchase, McCartney said that he focused changes on growth of circulation and finance, as well as coverage areas, to make the papers more profitable.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania lineage of the modern-day Trend began with a publication called the Piggyback Shopper. The shopper was first printed in 1963 by Anne and Bill Smith, along with their partner, Ed Nevins. It was printed on a mimeograph in the basement of Nevins' Morrisville home.
The shopper, which contained mostly ads and a few pages of editorial, was almost immediately successful. Within six months, the Smiths bought Nevins out, and moved the office to Yardley. The move of the office location was directed then to Fairless Hills and finally to Langhorne.
Changing office locations was not the only groundbreaking movements for the product. The foremost paper of its kind in the Bucks County area, the Piggyback Shopper continued to expand, with the Smith's adult children among those working in the advertising and production departments and warehouse.
As the paper became more successful, Bill Smith decided to give it a more professional name. In the mid 1980s, he opted to call it the Bucks County Midweek, as the paper came out on Wednesdays.
Since the paper was widely popular to its readership, Smith tested expansions of the paper. Although it chiefly covered most of Bucks County, the Midweek had already begun to branch out to other areas, such as Lambertville, N.J. Soon, it would also test markets in the Huntingdon Valley area of Montgomery County.
Though these markets showed promise, the logistics of mailing at the time made the expansion cost-prohibitive, and so short-lived. Smith decided at that time to keep the Midweek focused in Bucks County.
In August of 1987, the Smylie family, publishers and founders of the Northeast Times in Philadelphia, purchased the Midweek from the Smith family. Bob Smiley was running the Times — his mother, Eleanor Smylie, had charged him and his brother, Tim, with the management of the company. Richard Thorpe Lawson, who founded the Northeast Times in 1934, had bequeathed the paper to Eleanor, his wife, and she went on to serve as the board chairwoman until she passed away in 1998.
Bob Smylie, upon acquiring the Midweeks from Smith, moved the office back to Fairless Hills and formed ProMedia Publishing Co., a business that encompassed both of his publications.
Despite common ownership, the Midweek was housed separately from the Northeast Times, at first. The Smylie Times building on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia only housed a small business office for the Times; Times production was done at another office at 8033 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia.
Smylie continued to attempt to keep the two publications separate, physically as well as in a marketing sense. He did eventually combine them, however, when he moved both publications to the current Trevose office in the early 1990s.
Following the death of board chairwoman and Bob’s mother, Eleanor Smylie, in October of 1998, ProMedia was ready for a change.
Two histories collide
While Ed McCartney was busy changing and strengthening the Trend product in New Jersey, a simultaneous and similar changeover was occurring in Pennsylvania. Robert “Bob” T. Smylie, then publisher of a publishing company called ProMedia, was busy producing the publications of the Northeast Times (NET), located in northeastern Philadelphia, the Bucks County Midweek and the Montgomery County Midweek.
While the history and start of this side of the company is reported above, it was in the late 1990s that the two would begin to merge.
In 1998, Smylie sold his company, ProMedia, to the Philadelphia-based Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. (PNI), then owned by media giant Knight Ridder. PNI at that time included the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer. For the Midweeks, negotiations of the sale began in October of 1998, though a final purchase by PNI was not announced in the papers until February 1999.
PNI acquired ProMedia, according to current staff members, as a “vehicle for (PNI) supplements and inserts.” In other words, the powers-that-be at the Inquirer, in particular, thought that the acquisition of community newsweeklies would allow the Inquirer full, suburban penetration. The purchase would also allow for cross-selling of advertisements between products, thus allowing for inserts sold by the Inquirer to be distributed via the suburban newsweekly products.
To accomplish this goal, PNI acquired Smylie's products, which then only included nine Bucks County zones, one Montgomery County zone and the NET. Each of the then 10 zones of what would later become Trends were titled “Midweeks.”
According to former employees, PNI was facing decreased advertising revenue, as the Internet became more and more popular. PNI also was facing increased newsprint and mailing costs, and needed a way to increase profits.
The company focused efforts on the many small neighborhood businesses and local products and services. Such businesses would not likely focus ad dollars on a large, city daily, but instead would need a product much like that of the Midweeks to focus on a local area.
When goals to start its own local product became too costly of an idea, PNI approached ProMedia to do the job.
In 1999, under the same line of thinking as the purchase of Smylie’s Midweeks, PNI required an expansion into nearby New Jersey suburbs, as well. To fulfill that need, PNI acquired Ed McCartney’s Trend products in a sale in 1999 to fully surround the Philadelphia region with PNI-owned products.
From 1998 to 2000, Smylie stayed on as publisher of the Midweeks. From 1999 to 2000, McCartney stayed on as publisher of The Trends. But, soon, the two, independent branches of the company would change.
A new millennium, a new name
In 2000, PNI renamed and combined the Bucks County Midweek, the Montgomery County Midweek, the NET and all of the New Jersey Trends into one, united company. This company was called Broad Street Community Newspapers (BSCN). At that time of change, McCartney took the lead as publisher, as Smylie retired.
In 2000, in addition to a new company name, the product name of the Midweeks was then changed over to The Trend. According to Kathy Ganser, current production manager in Trevose, the name change was gradual, with the first attempt called the Trend Midweeks.
Over time, the “Midweek” portion of the products’ graphic became smaller and smaller, eventually phasing out the word altogether, thus turning all of BSCN’s community newsweekly/shoppers into “The Trend.” Mastheads were designed to reflect what areas each particular zone featured and serviced. The tagline of “A Community NewsWeekly serving…” was featured under “The Trend” logo on each masthead.
Bigger and bigger
From 2000 on, McCartney continued the expansion, which Smylie had started into Montgomery County. He also began, in later years, to branch the Trend product into Chester and Delaware counties, as well as the Main Line. (Again, for detailed dates and areas of expansion, please see the maps in the end of this report.)
To accommodate its western-suburban growth, BSCN began a new office, first located in Valley Forge (West Norriton). Original plans were to add the third office, after New Jersey’s and Trevose’s locations, in Montgomery County and to have significant local coverage, with a 25/75 split of editorial to ads. In the spring of 2000, this expansion office was opened with a production manager, a general manager, four ad reps, a receptionist, one editor and one editorial assistant. The office was producing the paper manually, with cut-and-paste methods, but would soon make goals to go digital.
The Montgomery County office turned to New Jersey to focus on digital procedures, as this office was already up to PNI standards for print.
In 2005, after a lease was up at the Valley Forge/West Norriton location, the office was relocated to its present location in King of Prussia, at 780 Fifth Ave., Suite 100 in the Hessian Hills business complex.
According to McCartney, the Trend had always been designed to be a “hybrid between a shopper and a newsweekly.” While “ad revenue (financially) supports it,” the papers were designed to maintain a “local flavor, a local touch” with the inclusion of editorial content.
McCartney says that it is his opinion that the goals and look of the paper have seemed to remain “relatively consistent” since his time at BSCN, and even since his takeover of Smith’s trend products in 1994 with local stories and local retail and service providers.
Other BSCN growth
Along with Trend growth, the BSCN company also acquired the Star and Home News in 2003 from the John Stern-owned Star Newspaper Group, located in the city of Philadelphia.
A change in publishers, products
McCartney stayed on as BSCN publisher until 2004. At that time, Darwin Oordt, the publisher prior to BSCN’s current George Troyano, took the lead.
Oordt focused the goals of The Trend products more to its community newspaper feel. He had said, “we want to create a product that is welcomed by every home; we want people to feel they need it to survive, that their life is not good without it.”
To promote this community newspaper feel, with an increased editorial content, Oordt created the concept of the Trend Leader. According to many previous employees, the new creation faced many budget barriers, as well as the usual challenges of newly increased coverage areas. Former employee, General Manager Leslie Hamada and (currently on-leave) Production Director Bob Posa, both stationed in the King of Prussia office, were manned with the task of creating and improving the Leader products.
In the span of three to four months, the Leaders were created and launched with little preparation or planning. In August 2005, Montgomery County zones MC13 and MC14 were started as the first Leaders. In September of the same year, the Delaware County DC5 was added. October 2005 saw the addition of Chester County zones CC4 and CC5. Each Leader was given its own editorial head, as a one-person edit staff.
At the same time, in the summer of 2005, the advertising reps were removed from the territories they formerly covered to allow for open selling, in any zone or for any product. There were no longer ad reps assigned to a particular zone.
In November 2005, a managing editor position was created at the King of Prussia office, set with the goal of managing the five, newly created Leader zones, as well as the editorial content of the current King of Prussia-produced Trends.
Current operations, growth
At this time, as seen by the maps in the back of the report, the zones for King of Prussia total as follows: DC 1-5; CC 1-5; MC 10-14 and ML 1-4, including the addition to the five new leaders.
At the same time, the Trevose office is dubbed the task of maintaining zones MC 1-9 and Bucks 1-9. Here, the zones are handled by one editor for content, managed under the NET/Star/Home News management, headed by John Scanlon.
The New Jersey office, located in Voorhees handles all New Jersey Trends, zones Camden County 1-8; Burlington County 1-8; and Gloucester County 1-3. Here, under the management of General Manager Roseann Oleyn, the content is controlled by one editor and one reporter.
All three offices rely also on a freelance-based writing supply for additional content. All offices have their own production team. Advertisements for all three offices, across all zones of Trend and Trend Leader, may be sold, as there are no current territories or zones assigned to reps.
In February of 2006, Bucks County’s B8 zone was changed from a Trend to a Trend Leader. This was the first Leader to be a former Trend, and not simply a new expansion zone with a new product in a new area. This zone too was granted one editor to run the editorial content of the product. Due to the location of the area covered, the editor was the first to remain in the Trevose location and maintain a Leader, while the remaining five editors of Trend Leaders are stationed in King of Prussia.
Changes from above
On Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, Knight Ridder, the parent company for PNI, announced the sale of its company, after repeated pressure from shareholders. The media giant, which at the time also owned BSCN, decided to sell.
On Monday, March 13, 2006, it was released that McClatchy, a media company less than half Knight Ridder’s size, would purchase the number-two media conglomerate in the nation for $4.5 billion dollars. While many employees were happy just to know an answer to the “who would own us” question, the happiness was short-lived.
Upon announcement of purchase, McClatchy also noted that it would only be keeping 20 of the 32 daily newspaper chains attached to the Knight Ridder sale. Among the 12 to be sold off to the highest bidder was PNI, which included the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, philly.com and, of course, BSCN.
As Trend employees heard rumor upon rumor of a sale and of the prospective future owners, the air was thick with nervousness and a fear of the unknown. By spring, there were at least five major bidders on the negotiation table, all with a fair share of pros and cons for the company. The sale was not the only thing making employees unnerved.
In April of 2006, Oordt announced that he would be leaving the BSCN family to be publisher of the Penny Saver, a shopper product in Maryland. Soon after, he took along with him the general manager of the King of Prussia office, Julian Rosado, the following May. Leaving BSCN leader-less, many employees feared for the future of the company. As just a small portion of the large, PNI family, it was hard to tell what future buyers or, for that matter, a future publisher might do with BSCN.
On May 23, 2006, what most thought then and continue to optimistically think of as good news came to the BSCN offices. Philadelphia Media Holdings, L.L.C., a locally-based, newly-formed company headed by public relations mogul Brian P. Tierney was found to be the highest bidder for PNI. The hands-on Tierney would become owner/publisher as PNI’s publisher, Joe Natoli, would soon step down to take up a position at a Florida university. For $562 million, the newly formed PMH became owners of the BSCN products, including the Trend and Trend Leaders.
Still finding itself leaderless, it would not be until June 26, 2006, that BSCN found itself a new publisher. On that date, George Troyano took the helm and remains the company’s publisher.
