By Steven Saint, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Feb. 24--Hank Walter is in the business of good news. He recently marked his 20th year publishing the Cheyenne Edition, a small weekly tabloid newspaper chock-full of District 12 school news, photos of fund-raising socialites and park and recreation tidbits.
He also had a record sales year at a time when his competitor to the north, Manitou Springs' Pikes Peak Journal, was closing its doors and newspaper advertising revenues nationwide were down as much as 10 percent.
'We have set records since 1999, and last year was our best year ever,' says Walter, who turns 65 Monday. 'I'm not an economist. I have no clue why.'
The diminutive Walter, usually seen sporting a charcoal ivy cap and white beard, had no previous publishing experience when he launched the Cheyenne Edition in the Broadmoor area in 1982. The Oklahoma native was reared in Loveland and moved to the Springs in 1963 to work in insurance.
He sold his insurance business and did some writing for the Fountain Valley News. He liked the job a lot.
His wife, Carolyn, had never run a newspaper office, and friend Eileen Carter had never sold a newspaper ad. The three of them were breaking even after six months.
With capital from his business sales and a loan from the Bank at Broadmoor -- where a banker had originally suggested that Walter start a paper -- he set off to find good neighborhood news falling through the cracks at the Gazette Telegraph, now The Gazette, and the Colorado Springs Sun, which folded in 1986.
'We were successful in a very short time, and I was ready to launch 20 papers in southern Colorado,' Walter says. 'But it wasn't that easy. You need to sell ads and get the paper delivered on a reliable basis.'
Walter tried the formula on the city's east side, but the Sandcreek Edition lasted only a year. The advertising just wasn't there during the recession of the late 1980s. In 1992, Walter started the Briargate Edition, which sprouted in the rich retail and residential environment along Woodmen Road and continues today as the Woodmen Edition.
The Woodmen Edition's 14,000-copy print run is now twice that of the Cheyenne Edition. The Woodmen Edition is distributed along Woodmen Road from Rockrimmon to Powers Blvd. The Cheyenne Edition, whose circulation has been at about 7,000 for the past decade, continues to cover the Broadmoor, Skyway and Cheyenne Canon areas.
Walter has eight full-time employees split between his Cheyenne Edition office off Eighth Street and his Woodmen Edition office on North Union Blvd. Some 70 carriers deliver the free papers to doorsteps every Friday.
He won't disclose his revenues, but most of it comes from display ads for local businesses. The Cheyenne Edition carries a couple of full-page ads from prominent real estate agencies, a few between a quarter- and half-page in size and dozens of small-business ads, from barber shops to plastic surgeons.
The paper's open ad rate -- the highest, from which advertisers can negotiate down for size and frequency -- is $12 a column inch, roughly a third of The Gazette's open rate. The circulation of the two weeklies is about one-fifth The Gazette's daily circulation.
Like his early mentor, Pikes Peak Journal publisher John Graham, Walter had the chance to sell his small weeklies to a community newspaper conglomerate. Walter had used Graham's equipment to typeset the Cheyenne Edition for two years, but a formal partnership never gelled.
The two men ended up competitors for years along the west side and in Rockrimmon.
'Hank's had good instincts with going into areas that advertisers wanted to get,' says Graham, now a software engineer under contract with Schriever Air Force Base. 'He's done a good job of focusing on neighborhood and school district issues.'
In 1998, Graham sold his four Journal newspapers -- covering Manitou Springs, Rockrimmon, Cheyenne Mountain and Garden of the Gods -- to Colorado Community Newspapers, an affiliate of the Texas-based Westward Communications LP, for $180,000.
Colorado Community Newspapers also bought the Monument Tribune and, soon afterward, approached Walter about selling. The offer was good, Walter says, but he decided not to bite.
'I realized I just wasn't ready to quit,' he says. 'I'm not going to retire; I'm also not going to work very hard.'
Walter occupies a small, unassuming desk in the back corner of the Cheyenne Edition storefront, near the workstation of his 36-year-old son, Andy. Andy started delivering the Cheyenne Edition in high school and eventually dragged his father and the company into the computer age.
Walter figures Andy will take over the business sometime in the next five to 15 years. He doesn't expect newspapers -- especially small community ones -- to go away anytime soon.
'People want to read interesting stories about their town and their neighbors,' he says. 'Advertisers want to get results. They're not going to get any of that over the Internet anytime soon.'
To see more of The Gazette, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.gazette.com
(c) 2002, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
