Collier County, which includes the paper’s home community of North Naples, has a population of about 322,000 according to 2010 census data. Some of the success in Naples is related to the area’s newspaper-friendly demographics-an older wealthier population that has helped the Daily News hold on to the print franchise better than most dailies. executive who appointed Neill as Daily News publisher, says he is “as close as a public company can have to having an entrepreneurial figure.” The Paper and the Market “He has the faith and the trust of those people that are working for him or with him,” says one of the paper’s ad directors who’d follow his boss “off a cliff.” Much of the credit is given to Neill, an aggressive and innovative leader who says the key to success is “engineering your organization with the intent of dramatically increasing professionalism.” When parent company Scripps releases its quarterly financial results, there is often a section singling out the economic performance in Naples. While total newspaper industry ad revenue, print and online, dropped by more than 7% in 2011 and by about another 6% in the first three quarters of 2012, according to the Newspaper Association of America, revenue at the Daily News grew in 2011 and then was up every quarter in 2012 over the same period a year earlier. The results at the News, which serves a Florida Gulf Coast resort community, stand out in an industry where many dailies continue to suffer from declining ad revenue, particularly on the print side. As part of a broad cultural change at the paper that began almost three years ago, the News overhauled its sales operation with a change in personnel, structure and operating philosophy that included rethinking the basic concept of how sales territories are configured and managed. Among the papers surveyed for Pew Research’s March 2012 report on “The Search for New Business Models,” more than three-quarters reported working on retraining their sales staffs and changing the way they are compensated.Īt the Naples Daily News, publisher Dave Neill and his team have gone considerably further. As news organizations respond to the economic challenges of the digital era, one such response has been to focus on sales teams that had long been steeped in a legacy culture.
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