Struggling to survive in Xenia

As newspapers across the United States shut down, Xenia’s newspaper keeps grinding along.

Editor’s note: Since the reporting for this article, Scott Halasz no longer works for the Xenia Daily Gazette.

By Maggie Fipps

XENIA, Ohio – Scott Halasz, former editor at the Xenia Daily Gazette, had to scrap to stay in journalism.

Admittedly, it wasn’t his first choice. In high school, they had meetings for clubs students could join as electives: yearbook, newspaper, and radio.

“I signed up for everything I could just get out of classes,” Halasz said. “My English grades weren’t the best, but the yearbook advisor took a chance on me.”

After studying broadcasting at Ohio State, he pivoted to newspapers. He worked as a freelance writer for the Centerville, Bellbrook and Kettering Local Times, then secured a full-time position at the Beavercreek paper.

What do those papers have in common? They no longer exist.

“A lot of people are getting out of this business, especially the broadcast people,” Halasz said. “Every time I turn around, someone’s leaving the TV station and then resurfacing a week later as like the PR person for this, that or the other thing.”

Halasz himself left journalism for about 10 years. He jumped around, doing home improvement, selling cars and insurance. But something about the newspaper stuck.

“I got the itch back in me,” he said.

The business had changed since he left in the early 2000s. Since 2005, the United States has had a net loss of 3,005 newspapers, including a few Halasz worked at early in his career. Mid-career journalists like him were hit the hardest. The number of full-time journalists aged 32-54 declined by 42% between 2008 to 2018.

When Halasz arrived at the Gazette, the editorial staff hovered around six people. A Xenia reporter, a Fairborn reporter, an editor, a sports editor, and Halasz. Now, it is down to him and one other reporter, although they are trying to hire someone soon.

“People can’t live on $13 an hour, unfortunately,” Halasz said.

The former daily paper went down to two print days a week, alternating print days with other papers in their media group. AIM Media Midwest, headquartered in South Texas, owns the Xenia Daily Gazette, Washington Court House Record-Herald, Urbana Daily Citizen, Wilmington News Journal and many other small papers around Ohio.

While this move expands (in theory) the Gazette’s resources, it also limits their individuality in page design.

“All the different papers have the same templates, so it’s hard to vary if there’s something special we want to do,” Halasz said.

For example, AIM Media outsourced their page layout to a central location so newspapers did not need to hire a separate person to construct the paper. However, this creates early deadlines for story budgets that limit what news can go into the print edition.

“We keep trying to figure out why it takes so long to paginate a paper,” Halasz said. “Especially when we’ve got the Fairborn and the Xenia paper, the guts are all common, it’s just the front page and the back page are different. I can’t figure out why they need that much time. But you can’t fight City Hall.”

Between scrapping for stories and putting together a paper on deadline days, digital strategy is executed haphazardly. Halasz said they put stories online between print days but are limited by technology and who can go out to report stories.

The widening gap between generations also makes the print versus digital debate more tense.

“Unfortunately, in Greene County, if you draw a line down the middle of Xenia and go east, it’s more older people who want to read a newspaper,” Halasz said. “If you go West towards Beavercreek, Bellbrook, they’re the ones that are going to  be online, so it’s kind of difficult.”

Even with the hustle to cover their area, the speed of communication online makes timely news harder and harder. Halasz worries about the state of journalism in a world that wants rapid news over right news.

“My feeling is something big is going to happen with some type of newspaper or some type of online presence that’s going to end up in a major lawsuit,” Halasz said. “I think that push to be first and get everything online, I think that’s going to shift because people want to get things online so quickly, it’s going to at some point cause a huge issue in the space time continuum, to quote ‘Back to the Future.’ I think things are going to settle back and maybe we’ll start printing more.”

At the Gazette, they don’t have the luxury of speed or breaking the news on social media. With limited staff and technology, they simply focus on the bread and butter of newspapers: schools, sports and obits.

“I read the obituaries when I wake up, because if I see my name, I’m going back to bed,” Halasz said with a laugh.

But if Halasz had his way, he would love to hire more staff to cover the Xenia community better. He also desires to simply tell good stories, featuring the people who call Xenia home. Right now, that might be on the back burner while he figures out how to put together the next day’s paper or edits the next press release or the myriad of other small tasks on a small staff in a small newsroom.

“I think we’re in a survival mode,” Halasz said.