Last week, from the Morgantown Dominion-Post:

BREAKING: Ogden Newspapers set to buy The Dominion Post

The Ogden Newspapers will purchase The Dominion Post from the Raese family of Morgantown and its West Virginia Newspaper Publishing Co., the two companies announced Wednesday.

Read More Here: https://t.co/sAQxU9fEPJ

— The Dominion Post Newspaper (@DominionPostWV) September 11, 2024

From that article:

“We are extremely proud to be given the opportunity to carry on the work done by the Greer and Raese families for the past 101 years at The Dominion Post,” Nutting said. “The newspaper has served the residents of Morgantown well since its founding, and we plan to honor and build on their legacy of strong community journalism well into the future by continuing to publish — both in print and on digital media platforms — community-focused content that covers the issues most important to readers.”

Some thoughts on the Ogden purchase

Since the Dominion-Post’s daily paper is behind a pay wall (and I already pay for four online papers), I currently do not read the paper on a regular basis. Some of the paper’s reporting and editorializing, especially on statewide news, does make it to Yahoo News, however. There, I’ve previously noted that the paper, despite the Raese family’s connections to the Republican Party, has sometimes been critical of Republican officials. (Riley Moore and Mac Warner, for examples. Compare that with Ogden's Moore/Warner coverage where both receive nothing but puff pieces.)*

What’s next for the Dominion-Post? I don’t know but over the years, I’ve discussed the similarities between Robert Nutting’s business plan for his newspapers (I call it “newspapers on the cheap”) and how he runs the Pittsburgh Pirates. (See here, for example.) For the newspapers, I noted that the plan will usually:

1. Minimize costs by cutting workers, overworking those who are left, and underpaying them.
2. Utilize economies of scale by printing previously used local editorials throughout the chain.
3. Periodically publish columns and editorials reminding readers what a great job the newspaper is doing.
   

Our local papers demonstrate all of the above. So, unless the Dominion-Post is already bare-boned, I would expect layoffs. And in the last ten years, Ogden has purchased the nearby Washington and Uniontown papers so I would think that Morgantown readers should expect to start seeing irrelevant Pennsylvania editorials along with editorials from Parkersburg, Wheeling, Weirton and other Ogden locations. Finally, our local Ogden papers do not appear to employ any full-time local sports reporters. I wonder what Ogden will do in Morgantown where WVU sports is so important?

I’ll leave you with the thoughts of Ogden’s editorial director, John McCabe, who was interviewed by radio station WAJR about the purchase (the emphasis is mine):

“Generating content, unique local content that you can’t find anywhere else - that’s the bedrock of what local newspapers do,” McCabe said. ”So, that is always our first focus - what is the right content mix.”

Okay, it was radio – we don’t know if McCabe said this with a straight face.