MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — King Lear’s three daughters had their lands and loyalties to fight over. Jane Austen’s Dashwood sisters had the prospect of marriage to occupy them, and Anton Chekhov’s three sisters had local military officers to brighten their days.
None of them ever contemplated a future as risky as newspapers.
For a long time, neither did the Lynn sisters, even though they are a fifth-generation newspaper family. Polly, Christy and Elsie Lynn left behind their father’s dusty but cozy newsrooms for college and careers.
Now they are back. Elsie, 26, moved home in 2010 after she ran out of money while working and traveling through Asia. She manages two of her father’s weeklies in the Burlington suburbs of Colchester and Essex.
Polly, 29, returned in 2011 from Denver, and has thrown herself into running the weekly newspaper in Killington, the popular ski town. Christy, 28, moved back in June after her boyfriend finished graduate school in Vancouver. She helps her father, Angelo, running the business side of Middlebury’s paper, The Addison County Independent.
It is conventional wisdom that newspapers are a fading enterprise. Last month, the Tribune Company bought 19 local television stations even as it sought to sell its portfolio of papers, and twice in August, big-city papers changed hands: The New York Times sold The Boston Globe and other properties for $70 million, after paying $1.1 billion for The Globe 20 years ago, and the Graham family said it would sell The Washington Post after eight decades of ownership.
But instead of fleeing the newspaper business, the Lynn sisters have embraced it, and not just because it is part of their heritage.
“I’ve grown up in the papers,” said Elsie Lynn. “But I don’t think that’s the reason I’m in it. The future is exciting for me. We have this chance and this opportunity to be pioneers and change our career and change this industry.”
The papers the Lynn sisters help run have been surprisingly profitable. They have not faced bankruptcy like newspapers of the Tribune Company including The Los Angeles Times and haven’t cut coverage like The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. In these parts of Vermont, where Internet connections are less reliable and winter snowstorms can block roads for days, readers often prefer print.
Mr. Lynn said that he had run his newspapers debt-free for a decade. While his papers aren’t making money yet from their digital efforts, his newspaper and phone book businesses generate about $4.5 million in gross revenue.
“We can’t afford not to make money,” Mr. Lynn said as he sat in his office here surrounded by photographs of his daughters, the family dogs dozing loudly nearby. “There’s no future losing money in any of these papers.”
It helps that Mr. Lynn has a long history in the business. His great-grandfather, Charles Scott, bought The Iola Register in Kansas in 1882. Mr. Lynn was raised upstairs from the offices of another nearby Kansas paper called The Humboldt Union. In 1984, Angelo Lynn bought The Addison County Independent in Vermont and started building up his chain of papers. Mr. Lynn’s older brother, Emerson, owns two papers with his wife, Suzanne, and Angelo as well as two other Vermont papers.
Angelo Lynn speaks fondly of the newspaper life. He spends his weekends hiking and skiing with his daughters and weekdays churning out enterprising local journalism.
“Once you become part of a community, you see the good that a paper does,” Mr. Lynn said. “That’s very fulfilling.” His daughters’ newspaper futures were less certain. When Elsie Lynn arrived at the newsroom of The Colchester Sun and The Essex Reporter, she had never studied journalism or held a journalism job. She wasn’t convinced she wanted to work with her father and uncle.
“I’ve said, ‘Man, I don’t know, Dad, if this is what I want to do,’ ” she said as she sat in her threadbare newspaper office in a converted stable space on the outskirts of Colchester. “He said ‘No pressure.’ ”
She settled in, typing up wedding announcements, but before long her father asked her to review the papers’ finances. Elsie discovered they were owed $120,000 from advertisers. In three months, she collected $90,000. She also saved her father labor costs by absorbing multiple job titles. Elsie said she often logged 13-hour days writing and editing stories and promoting them on social media.
Polly Lynn was living in Colorado working for an educational tour company with her partner, Jason Mikula, when her father received an offer to buy The Mountain Times in Killington. Mr. Lynn asked the couple, who were already thinking of moving, to come to Vermont to run it. The couple took over in September 2011 just as Hurricane Irene hit and Killington was hit with some of the storm’s worst flooding. She produced the first editions from her father’s dining room table.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/business/media/vermont-sisters-with-roots-in-news-embrace-small-town-papers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss