Published on July 1, 2006

New London –– The Day Publishing Co. has announced it will assume ownership and control of Shore Publishing LLC's nine weekly Times Community News Group newspapers, which stretch from Old Lyme to Westerly.

Gary Farrugia, The Day's editor and publisher, said the nine weeklies have “substantially expanded the footprint of The Day Publishing Company.” He said the acquisition, effective July 1, would give The Day the ability to reach into every single household within the weeklies' circulation area.

“This will enable us to expand our local news coverage and provide much more in-depth coverage for each town,” Farrugia added.

The nine weeklies are: The Lyme Times; The Waterford Times; The New London Times; The Groton Times; The Montville Times; The Thames River Times, which covers Ledyard and Preston; The Mystic Times; The Stonington Times and The Westerly Times.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by The Day. The Times distributes more than 100,000 free copies each week by mail.

The Day purchased an equity stake in Madison-based Shore Publishing in January 2003. At that time, the independent weekly newspaper company had seven weeklies, which has since grown to 16 weeklies covering an area from East Haven to Westerly that reaches about 180,000 households.

The Day's ownership will cover the nine weeklies east of the Connecticut River, while Shore Publishing will publish the weeklies west of the Connecticut River, which stretch from Old Saybrook to East Haven.

Farrugia said the agreement also includes The Day's eventual ownership and management control of the Shore Publishing papers west of the Connecticut River by January 2008.

Farrugia said the news departments of the nine Times weeklies will remain separate from The Day's news departments but that the advertising functions for those weeklies will be consolidated into The Day's advertising operations. Lee Howard, a veteran reporter and editor with The Day, will continue to serve as the Times weeklies' managing editor for news.

Ryan Duques and James Warner, co-publishers and founders of Shore Publishing, welcomed The Day's ownership of the weeklies. The two entrepreneurs founded the weekly newspapers when they were still in college and printed their first issue in 1996.

“We are thrilled to see the continuing evolution of The Times' weekly newspapers,” Duques said. He said the weeklies will benefit from the additional news and advertising synergies of The Day and the nine weeklies.

Warner said the strategic advantages of combining the two organizations under one management team would add to the long-term strength of their newspaper venture.

“I am confident that this decision will create better advertising opportunities for area businesses and increased editorial coverage for the local communities,” he said.

The Day Publishing Co. has made a "significant" but undisclosed equity investment in Shore Publishing, LLC, which owns seven weekly newspapers west of the Connecticut River, from Old Saybrook to East Haven, the heads of both companies announced Tuesday.

The partnership, which involves news, advertising and printing, extends the reach of The Day – either with its daily or the jointly owned weekly products – from Westerly, R.I., to the borders of New Haven. In addition to its daily newspaper, The Day also produces a number of tourism publications and a direct-mail product within its own market. Combined, the two businesses have an ability to reach 200,000 homes.

Gary Farrugia, editor and publisher of The Day, declined to disclose the amount of the paper’s investment, but said The Day on Monday purchased "an equity stake" in Shore. "Joining forces with Shore Publishing provides entrée to a very compatible market across the Connecticut River, and it’s been a longtime goal of this newspaper to establish itself there," Farrugia said.

"We’re extremely excited at the prospect of having towns west and east of the river joined by these two publications," Farrugia said.

Mark Young, senior vice president of the publishing group of Citizens Bank, which financed the deal, said the arrangement is "a somewhat unique transaction. It’s unusual in my experience that a company like The Day would have a cluster of weeklies that close geographically where the two fit so nicely together."

Because "this is not an outright purchase of Shore," he said, "there are strong incentives to grow Shore organically … The Day provides them with an anchor and also access to capital to grow on."

"For our operation," said Ryan Duques, co-publisher with James Warner for Shore, "this opportunity really provides us with an enormous amount of resources, which will enable us to have access to editorial support, information technology support and circulation support beyond what we’ve had before."

Farrugia said The Day would be giving advertisers "an opportunity to market with the Shore weeklies and vice versa. If you’re an advertiser in Old Lyme, this is a opportunity to hop the river to Old Saybrook."

Because consumers travel farther to make larger purchases, Farrugia said, retailers of "big ticket items" will find that opportunity particularly attractive.

By the same token, the chance to advertise in the weeklies, which reach every household in their circulation areas, will be attractive to smaller advertisers who can’t afford to advertise in the full run of The Day, he said.

Also, beginning next week, The Day will be printing Shore’s seven newspapers. Shore has been printing its papers at The Hartford Courant.

The two companies will share customer databases and sales efforts, Duques said.

Duques and Warner were still in college when they printed their first issue of The Source in Madison in 1996. They now publish the seven weekly papers that are delivered free in the mail to the residents and businesses of 13 towns from Old Saybrook to East Haven, with a circulation of 87,000.

They have shown a 300 percent growth in revenues since 2000, and they are projecting $3.9 million in gross revenues for 2003. Shore employs "about 40 people altogether," Duques said, not including freelancers.

Duques described the award-winning weeklies as being "extremely focused on in-depth local news and features. We run an extremely popular column called Person of the Week, always on the front page." The weeklies also run weekly profiles of persons in local sports and the arts and cover town and school board meetings as well as topics of regional interest, he said.

"Our goal is to provide the information to the communtiy to give people pride in their town," said Duques. "We strive to inform people about the things that are going on, but we also strive to show people all the good things that are happening to them."

Since its inception, Shore has taken major advertisers, including grocers and car dealers, from the chain of weeklies owned and operated by the Journal Register Company in the same region, Duques said.

Young, from Citizens, said that for Duques and Warner, "it was a chance for the two principlals to take some money off the table, to realize some of the fruits of their labor."

The towns covered by Shore weeklies are Old Saybrook, Westbrook, Clinton, Essex, Chester, Deep River, Madison, Killingworth, Guilford, Branford, North Branford, North Haven and East Haven.

k.robinson@theday.com

By CLAUDIA VAN NES
Courant Staff Writer
Published on 5/11/2001

A pool is for swimming, a garbage can for trash. Unless you have a vision. Then an inverted garbage can at the bottom of a swimming pool, weighed down with rocks, becomes a submarine you can crouch inside until the trapped air becomes a bit thin. In which case, you face the problem of resurfacing.

Thankfully, the submarine inventors James Warner and Ryan Duques figured out how to escape an underwater garbage can, ensuring they would be around to take on the newspaper world.

"We were always building things," says Warner, who moved to Duques' Madison neighborhood in the fourth grade and formed and instant partnership with him likeminded new pal.

They're still building things.

A decade after their first meeting, Warner and Duques remain partners, and the once very young entrepreneurs have turned into young entrepreneurs who just added another newspaper to Shore Publishing, their growing chain of weeklies based in their hometown Madison. Last year, the two 25-year-olds grossed $1.3 million and expect to do considerably better this year; the frames photo of the company outing in Duques' office is crowded with smiling employees, and Warner just bought himself a $269,000 house in Branford.

You'd be more likely these days to find ambitious young adults making bucks off the computer-or trying to-but these two guys were always most interested in marketing. Back in the sixth grade, for instance, they figured out how to transfer home movies to video, using a movie projector in the Warner basement and sold the service around town. They went on to a T-shirt dying operation, this time in the Duques basement, which left their hands purple for months, remembers Duques.

When they were in high school, the two actually formed a marketing company doing just about anything anyone asked. They drew up a business plan for a restaurant using a computer program and arranged the grand opening for a pizza shop where a friend hired to appear in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume failed to show.

"I had to be the Ninja Turtle," says Duques. "It was fun, actually."

They also compiled local restaurants' menus in a booklet they'd distribute to businesses that could use the menus to order lunch. In the summer of Duques freshman year at UMass and Warner' senior year at Hand High School, the owner of a Madison Restaurant jokingly told the guys, the local newspaper was getting so bad even they could do a better job at it.

The challenge fed their healthy egos and youthful optimism, and they worked on the concept every spare moment, meeting in Duques dorm room at UMass and in a spare bedroom in his parent's home during breaks.

They has no capital for their newspaper, which was to cover Madison and be called the Source, so they had to sell ads in advance. When they'd sold enough to get by, they put out their first issue. That was five years ago.

They wrote the thing and laid it out on Duques' dorm room floor, hiring a guy who worked in production at the UMass newspaper for $770 to whip it into shape; a student two doors down proofread and friends from high school gave their time and talent to the effort. In a couple of cases, "staff" members turned out to do nothing more than contribute their yearbook pictures to paste on the masthead.

"We made a couple of hundred dollars on the very first issue," says Warner, and "quadrupled our sales the next issue."

The Source was published quarterly and mailed to every household. "People loved it," says Duques.

"We had a real variety of things there-columns by the local people and stuff by readers. It made people feel proud of their town," he says. That is still the aim of the Source and the other papers which have joined it over the ensuing years.

The partnership has been without trouble, both say, but the ride hasn't always been on the crest of the wave. Duques and Warner almost drowned, in fact, on their second venture- another paper, the Sound, covering Branford, this one sold by subscription.

They opened an office in Branford, put a small staff there and commuted from their respective colleges to run the two papers.

Soon enough, they discovered advertisers weren't so interested in a paper with not many readers and that a duplication of staffs was a financial drain; so much so, they shut down the Branford paper, laid off the staff and re-grouped. "We couldn't close down all together, we were too much in debt," says Warner. The partners, with a single staff in one office in Madison, went back into Branford with the Sound several months later and have been holding their own there ever since.

The next year, they launched the Harbor News, covering Old Saybrook, Clinton and Westbrook and, still in college, also started the Guilford Courier.

Duques graduated in '98; Warner the next year, and they've been building their newspaper empire ever since. They papers now all come out weekly, and the latest one to join the chain is the Valley Courier covering Essex, Chester and Deep River.

There are now about 20 people on staff-it's hard to count because some are part time, some free-lance, some with other arrangements. But the operation is still out of one office on the second floor of the New Haven Savings Bank on Main Street, though nowadays there's a receptionist, advertising director, sales manager, editor, assistant editor, production staff and sales people.

The two owners wear crisp shirts and ties to work; their hair is short and Duques' office has a matching couch and chair, wall-to-wall carpeting, a cabinet behind his desk with framed pictures of his family. One shows him in a tux and his girlfriend in an evening dress.

It could easily pass for a high school prom picture, but it was taken this winter. Although Duques looks young enough to be president of a high school Future Business Leader's of America chapter, he's just been invited to join the board of Madison Chamber of Commerce. "I can't help looking so young," he laments.

But not so young in outlook. Both he and Warner make sure their newspapers aren't too flashy or offensive. Their aim is to satisfy their readers by offering them what they want.

This can mean a sizable distinction between, for instance, the paper you're reading at the moment, and one of Shore Publishing weeklies.

When a mother and two of her three young children were killed last winter in Guilford, Duques decided not to run a recent photo the paper had happened to take of all three children at a Christmas pageant.

"We don't want readers to feel bad about their community. People in Guilford knew we had the photo and asked we not run it for the sake of everyone, especially the family," says Duques .

The editor, Ethelene DiBona, who oversees a staff that writes the stories for all the newspapers, appreciates this kind of sensibility. "This is a great place to work," she says. "We get a lot done, but it's relaxed. They're not afraid to try new things and invest in new ideas." Marisa Nadolny, who came aboard as the office manager after college and a year later became assistant editor, is equally enthused as it is the advertising director Michelle DiPetro who commutes from Manchester each day and would travel longer if necessary. "I love this place," she says.

She also says selling ads isn't hard. At least not to Wilson Ford of Branford, which takes out a full-page color ad every week.

"They're very effective. It's the biggest advertising we do. We're very satisfied," says Wilson Ford's sales manager, Steve Hill, who says he is convinced the ads at Shore Publishing's newspapers sell more cars than the ads Wilson used to place in the Journal Register papers. Those papers include the New Haven Register and the Shoreline Newspapers, another string of weeklies in the same readership area as Shore Publishing.

The partners aren't terribly concerned about their competition, which also includes Main Street News, covering some of the same towns. These weeklies and the dailies in the area are all subscription.

Shore Publishing mails to 61,000 homes for free, and it's this total market penetration which assures happy advertisers, say Duques and Warner. They won't say how much their each making these days themselves, but they do say their careers are still as exciting as sinking that submarine in the pool 10 years ago. "It's the perfect job," says Duques.

In Madison, CT, two childhood friends founded what is now a chain of weekly newspapers serving the shoreline towns of Branford, Guilford, Madison, Clinton, Westbrook and Old Saybrook. These Young men were 18 when they started in the publishing business, printing a book of menus that they photocopied at a Staples store and sold to businesses in Madison.

They actually ran their first paper, The Source, from their colleges when they were 20. While they also aim to enlighten the reader, they want to make money, too, and in 2000 expect to top $1.3 million in advertising sales for the chain called Shore Publishing. They each turned 24 this year.

At Shore Publishing in Madison, the publishers, Ryan Duques and James Warner, saw a business opprtunity in 1996 when the Shore Line Times chain of weeklies was sold to the Journal Register Company, so they started a newspaper out of the home of Mr. Warner's parents.

The young men were still in college, Mr. Warner at Bryant College in Rhode Island, and Mr. Duques at the University of Massachusettes in Amherst. Both studied business and juggled activites like track and fraternity parties while running the paper by phone and e-mail messages from their dormitory rooms.

They couldn't find any investors, so they financed their first issue, a monthly, by getting advertisers to pay in advance. Now, with a small investment from their families, the paper had grown to a chain of four weeklies called The Source, The Sound, The Harbor News and The Guilford Courier, with about 20 employees.

This year, the company turned a small profit and plans to keep on expanding by hiring more reporters, editors and sales representatives, and by starting more newspapers. After experimenting with selling the paper by subscription, they have returned to their original business model of distributing it free.

Mr. Duques and Mr. Warner are listed as co-publishers on the masterhead, but both sell ads. Mr. Duques is in charge of the editorial side, supervising the editors and reporters. Neither has a degree in jounalism. They have been friends since the fourth grade and are long-time entrepreneurs and polished salesmen.

"A couple of weeks ago, the bags were packed and I was ready to go to Vermont for the weekend, then the police scanner started going nuts and I had to stop and cover a fire," Mr. Duques said. "There's nothing like the thrill of running a small business."

Mr. Duques photographed the fire and wrote a caption about the incident in which firefighters in Madison were called to put out the flames and save a 300-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig that lived in the house.

The Source and the sister papers do not run editorials or the police log, a main attraction in many local newspapers.

"I don't feel it's fair to do the police log if you don't have something about the results of the arrest," Mr. Duques said. "I don't think it's a positive reflection on the community, and if we can't cover it fairly, we shouldn't cover it at all. We are a source of information; we want people to come up with their own decisions."

While proud of their content, which includes community features, person of the week, columns by state senators and letters to the editor, Mr. Duques and Mr. Warner are especially proud of taking major advertising accounts away from the competing weekly and or from the New Haven Register, a daily newspaper.

"As a small paper, we give a different benefit than the larger guy," Mr. Warner said. "If an advertiser is unhappy they can talk directly to the publisher. They can talk directly to me."

By Alix Boyle New York Times 12.31.00