Northern Kentucky developer creating own niche with free Sunday newspaper

By Jessica F. Fisher
Community Journalism
University of Kentucky
Fall 2005 -- UPDATE: Paper ceases publication; for its story on its demise, click here.

Bill Butler, Northern Kentucky’s development tycoon, is now erecting more than just buildings.

Butler, CEO and president of Corporex, which he founded in 1965 at the age of 22, is best known for transforming Covington from a rundown river town to a thriving urban city. From the twin towers of River Center to the Embassy Suites, he has tackled many opportunities to make his mark on the Covington skyline.

On July 4, 2005, Butler and Donald Then made another sort of mark with Northern Kentucky as they gave birth to The Sunday Challenger.

The Challenger is published by Challenger Communications LLC, of which Butler owns the majority. Then, Challenger Communications’ president and chief operating officer and publisher of the Challenger, is Butler’s minority partner, though he wouldn’t disclose the monetary difference.

Then had been working for Butler for nearly two years. Before joining Butler, he was a senior manager with the financial services unit of Hillenbrand Industries in Batesville, Ind. A native of New York, Then holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from St. Bonaventure University, where he was first in his class, according to Then.

The two are more similar than one would presume. Butler, the oldest of nine, grew up in Covington the son of a plumber. Then grew up the son of a steel worker in Lackawanna, N.Y.

Together the two decided that they wanted to provide a public service to the Northern Kentucky community. Butler said he has a passion for his hometown community and that Then, who has always had a passion for journalism, finally had an opportunity to fulfill it. “Then inspired me,” said Butler. "I would not have financed this endeavor if he had not come along."

Like so many of Butler's business decisions over the years, the move was daring. With two daily papers and nine community weeklies already serving Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties, sustaining a new paper is not an easy job and costs more than a pretty penny, but money is on the Challenger’s side. Butler said he committed enough to keep the Sunday Challenger going for at least one more year before expecting to turn a profit. Though Butler didn’t say how much he invested, experts have said it was in the millions.

The daily Kentucky Post and the weekly Recorder papers in Boone, Campbell and Kenton County don’t publish a Sunday edition. The Kentucky/Cincinnati Enquirer, however, does. Then said the difference between the Enquirer and the Sunday Challenger is that the Challenger is “community intensive reporting.” The Enquirer covers national and international news, but the Challenger covers neither. The Challenger says it is a “Voice for Northern Kentucky” because as Then put it, “There was no voice for these people and Bill and I decided that we wanted to do something that would be a service for this great community. But it wasn’t done to replace what they’re doing (Enquirer/Post). I can’t compete with their daily stories, but I can compete for the perspective kind of stories.”

The Sunday Challenger, established to bring news to those three counties in Northern Kentucky, is based in Covington and is delivered free on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., depending on the area, to about 77,000 homes. In August the Challenger was delivered to 63,000 homes--a significant increase in just six months and double their circulation just a year ago. The Challenger’s requested circulation now reaches 30,000 more homes, give or take, than the Kentucky Enquirer. The Challenger is also available from red curbside boxes, restaurants, offices and other sites on Sunday. From these boxes alone nine thousand papers are distributed, which are strategically set up in high-traffic areas.

Though the Challenger’s readership tends to be highly educated, dual-income households with at least one member making $50,000 or more, it also tries to reach out to those who are not so fortunate, going to areas that are not high income, said Then. “We really try to reach everybody because we are a paper devoted to improving the lives of people in Northern Kentucky. My goal is a 100-thousand circulation paper that would be virtually in four of every five homes.”

Northern Kentucky had little or no voice in the Gannett-owned Cincinnati/Kentucky Enquirer, according to Vicki Pritchard, former Post writer and until recently assistant editor of projects for The Challenger. Though the Kentucky Enquirer has made efforts, time and again, to fill this void, for some reason, it appeared to some readers that it never made a real commitment to covering Northern Kentucky, said Pritchard. One reason Pritchard suggested is the fact that Gannett not only owns the Enquirer but also the weekly Recorder newspapers in Kenton, Boone and Campbell counties. “In my opinion and personal understanding, I have found that community papers owned by large chains lose touch with their readership,” said Pritchard.

It has been argued that the afternoon daily, The Kentucky Post, owned by E.W. Scripps Co., has consistently done a better job covering Northern Kentucky than the Enquirer, but neither paper gives enough space to Northern Kentucky news, said Pritchard.

Since Gannett Co. Inc. announced last year that it would end its joint operating agreement with E.W. Scripps Co. in 2007, there has been speculation that The Kentucky Post will soon cease publication and that Butler is positioning himself to fill the vacuum left by the Post. Then said Butler’s decision to start a paper was not inspired by Gannett’s announcement, and was sheer coincidence.

“Bill and I are both expecting the Post to continue publication beyond the termination of the JOA,” The said adding, “We are a community paper, and frankly, we would lose our draw if we became a daily.”

The Challenger’s editor, Tom Mitsoff, was raised with community news, literally. His parents owned and published the community newspaper in Beavercreek, Ohio, for 25 years. During more than 20 years in journalism, he has been the lead editor of publications for 15 years, and has been webmaster of company Web sites for three years.

He also co-owned with his sister a twice-weekly newspaper from 1988 to 1992 in Beavercreek, after his parents paper stopped running it. Mitsoff said he and his sister “competed against several daily and weekly publications. We gave some people who felt that they weren't getting a voice in local decisions a voice, and that was rewarding.” That makes him no stranger to the community newspaper and encourages the public to be involved.

His move to the Challenger was a chance to “open the pages to Northern Kentucky opinions, no matter what political persuasion they are. The only requirements are for arguments and positions to be based on verifiable facts, not rumor or innuendo.” The Sunday Challenge is a way for Mitsoff to clear the platform. Rather than an editorial page, The Challenger has the Sunday Challenge. This is a page dedicated to an issue at hand in which the paper asks the community to take the challenge and speak their mind. The ‘challenge’ evokes open dialogue among the community and a chance to ignite change first-hand.

Mitsoff has10 full-time editorial employees on his staff and an array of freelance writers. The full-sized newspaper, with color printing, has 32 pages on average and covers local issues that normally don’t span past the three major counties.

The Challenger offers “intensely local” stories to readers and serves as an advertising vehicle for companies that want to reach suburban Northern Kentucky households, said Mitsoff. The paper covers mostly encouraging feature stories and devotes an entire section to local sports, with very little mention of its close neighbor Cincinnati. There is also hardly any coverage of national or international news unless there is a direct tie to the Northern Kentucky region.

One example of how national news ties into local news was offered by the associate editor at the Challenger, Michael Jennings. “If Senator Jim Bunning, from Northern Kentucky, is involved in what sounds like to us a newsworthy story about some national issue, then we will report that, because he is a member of our community and our local link to a larger issue.”

Jennings came to the Challenger after having to leave state government because of a change in administrations. Moreover, after working as a reporter for The Courier-Journal in Louisville for 10 years and spending most of his newspaper career working at dailies, he decided it was time to move on to a more community- based paper.

If Jennings was trying to walk away from politics, he stumbled into the Challenger at the height of political discourse regarding the motives behind Bill Butler. Butler is not only the co-owner and money behind the Challenger, he is also a well-known and influential member of the community whose name decorates newspapers quite frequently--and not always with a heartwarming spin.

In the late 1990s, Butler came under fire after visiting the home of then Kenton County Judge-Executive Clyde Middleton to look over some bids for a county development project. The story was reported extensively by the Post and Enquirer with an often suspicious tone towards Butler’s motives. In the end Butler's Corporex ended up winning the bid, and competing developers filed suit.

Butler maintained that the bids were public records and that he went to Middleton's home to see them because he was leaving town the next morning. The county ended up paying $850,000 to settle a lawsuit with the two losing bidders, and Middleton resigned over the controversy. The county sued Butler and Corporex, and in 1999, Butler agreed to pay Kenton County a $425,000 settlement.

Rob Thrun, vice-president of architecture and engineering services at Al. Neyer, Inc. sat on the review board for the project bid and said it was public record and Butler was “railroaded.” Thrun claims the local media had it all wrong and that Butler’s name was smeared and a judge’s career ended because of political animosity between then Attorney General Ben Chandler and Butler over a transit bill. “None of the papers tried to contact me,” said Thrun, “and I was there with a first-hand account and instead they sided with rumors and allegations.”

Critics argue that after seeing his name all over the paper Butler just wanted to make sure another smear campaign wouldn’t be in the making. Those critics continuously argue that Butler’s Challenger is a convenient vehicle for him to expand his influence in the community.

The Challenger's publisher, Then, disputes claims that Butler is trying to exert power in the community and defended Butler’s role at the paper.

“The person who has the final say in the editorial content of this newspaper is me. Bill and I do not talk about it. I have never received a word or comment about anything regarding what goes into this paper. We want it to enrich the community, we want it to take action to change the community, we talk about those things and global perspectives but we never talk about specific issues. That is as honest I can be,” insisted Then.

Disapproval or suspicion of Butler’s role is just the beginning for the opponents of The Challenger. The too-conservative argument is a close second.

“Literally the same day I got two letters, one accusing me of being very liberal and the other accusing me of being very conservative,” said Then. “I think my people will tell you I am very, very strong on playing it as the issue describes it. I would not say we are one way or the other. I do not have any leanings one way or the other. I am very guarded so that no ones political perspective seeps into a story.”

When asked about whether the Challenger would endorse a candidate during elections Then said, “Absolutely not!”

“We won’t support a candidate. I think it is credible for us not to get involved, because it takes a lot of manpower to study all the issues. If I can’t promise my readers that we devoted the time and exhausted the necessary efforts to truly understand a candidate, then I won’t- and my staff is not large enough to make that promise to our readers.”

Avid Challenger reader Un Jin Ho of Crestview Hills said the paper is unpredictable and provocative. “They will take one party’s position depending on the issue and then on the next week they will take another party. It’s exciting; they keep people kind of off balance.”

Jennings, associate editor said, “It would be very unwise for us to identify ourselves as liberal, conservative, pro-Republican, pro-Democrat, given that the same people who would be taking those positions are the ones who also have to report.”

Jennings, like many of the other editors at the Challenger, holds a unique position. “We are cognitive of the fact that since we are a small paper and we all share the same chores, we cannot observe the traditional distinction between the news side of the paper and the editorial side of the paper. We do not have a wall there,” he said. “There are a number of us who have to write straight news, but then we have to editorialize, and we have to do that with some caution because we do not want to be perceived in our news reporting as working with a bias.”

Jennings added, “There’s a stronger mutual commitment--newspaper to community and community to newspaper--than if the paper of general circulation in a community comes from somewhere else.”

Kasey Neugent, a resident of Kenton County, said commitment to her community was exactly what was missing in the Post and Enquirer. Born and raised in Edgewood, she now lives in Fort Mitchell but works on the other side of the river. “My heart is with this town and with its people, but we are different from Cincinnati people, and until recently I felt as if we had to conform to being Cincinnatians.” She went on to say, “Let me clarify, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky need each other; we are indeed part of an extended metropolitan area, but we are not one and the same. We work outside of each other while maintaining a genuine interest in the other.”

For Vicki Pritchard, Neugent’s voice and others alike was what was missing from the Enquirer and the Post. “I believe readers want to read about what affects them and their neighbors, she said. A community paper can inform and educate individuals in a community about what they should be thinking about as a community.” A Voice for Northern Kentucky, as written in the sub-line under the paper’s name, is truly the Challenger’s mission, commented Pritchard.

Furthermore, the Challenger seeks “to help foster throughout our region a stronger sense of identity and a more expansive and better-informed vision for the future than would exist otherwise,” said Jennings. “We are trying to be a stronger local voice, a journalistic advocate for the interest of Northern Kentucky. We want to celebrate the greatness of Northern Kentucky, let people understand some of its potential and where it might be lagging.”

Phone: (859) 257-3744, Fax: (859) 323-9879

Al Cross, director , al.cross@uky.edu

Last Updated: February 16, 2006