TFP founder and publisher Tom Pounds takes us on his 19-year journey
When I first began my newspaper career back in 1990, the newspaper (The Los Angeles Daily News) was inches thick. We used to call it the information miracle.
All those people were on staff to create, print and deliver the paper in less than six hours. It was the place to get your daily dose of news, sports and advertising. In fact, there was only one place where you could go to get a job, buy a car or a house or find a garage sale. It was a dominant medium that had few rivals. With all that advertising, you could fund plenty of reporters and editors and create a great newspaper.
Back in 1990, the newspapers also got into the web business and started putting their product online. This trend continued for a few years until the “bright” leaders of our industry decided that giving the content away on our websites was the way to go. This was a hard trick to give away content online and still expect to sell a hard copy on the street.
When I arrived in Toledo as the vice president and general manager at the Toledo Blade in 2000, we were facing struggling circulation numbers and advertising was starting to go the way of the internet.
You could buy cars and homes over the internet. E-Bay was booming, and Craigslist followed. The game was changing. In 2004 I left the Blade and started the Toledo Free Press as a free weekly that was home delivered, as well as available on newsstands free of charge. We were quite successful for many years (we lasted 10) before lawsuits and diminishing advertising finally put an end to that dream.
I tell people that if advertising was what we were really good at, we would still be in business. Unfortunately, that was not the case. What we were good at was journalism. Of the 10 years we were in print, we were named the “best weekly in Ohio” six of the 10 years we were in business (we were second place the other four) by the Society of Professional Journalists. That was the Pulitzer Prize for us.
What we have seen over the years was the eroding of funding in the industry, which, in turn, led to layoffs in newsrooms everywhere. Journalism was being destroyed day by day and year by year. Nowadays, you can buy or sell a car within hours of posting them on Facebook Marketplace. Newspapers and journalism were becoming less and less relevant.
The closing of the Free Press in 2015 (10 years to the day of starting) was a tough pill to swallow. I was out of the business for many years until a now-good friend, Sean Nestor, contacted me to see if I had the archives somewhere. His stance was that we were a newspaper of record in those 10 years, and they should be preserved.
I still owned the name Toledo Free Press and the URL for the website. It was just blank when you went to toledofreepress.com. That was in 2019. What we have done since is restore the archives (still working on that to make all articles searchable) and get the site back up. When that happened, people noticed. I started getting news tips and thought to myself “there is still a hunger for local journalism!”
With the Blade’s dwindling circulation numbers (was 230,000 for Sunday papers when I left and it is now around 30,000), Toledo was turning into a news desert. That prompted me and Sean to start thinking of funding ideas to bring the paper back online. We landed on the nonprofit model, where we could still sell advertising, but it won’t be the main source of revenue. Donations would.
So, we began the process to build an organization that could support this effort. About two years ago we created a board of directors – local people to help us navigate the ups and downs of nonprofit fundraising. Our board includes:
- Brandi Barhite, director of enrollment communications at Bowling Green State University and former Free Press writer who also helped train our interns
- Dr. Bailey Dick, assistant professor of journalism at Bowling Green State University and a former intern for the Toledo Free Press
- Dan Kimmet, retired executive at Eaton Corporation and a friend. He also serves with me on the Owens Community College Foundation Board
- Sean Nestor, a network engineer at Sauder Woodworking Co., activist and self-proclaimed journalism fan. He also serves on the Toledo Integrated Media Education board (our parent board) and is a writer as well
- Linda Stacy, retired from Owens Community College as a workforce development officer and special assistant to the president for community relations. She is also a grant writer and has nonprofit experience
This great group has helped us get to this point to relaunch the Toledo Free Press as a nonprofit, online and free newsroom with no pay walls. Our goal is to bring more quality journalism to Toledo and our surrounding communities.
We will still have our “glass half full” attitude towards Toledo but will also do the investigative work and keep those in power accountable.
We will mentor and hire journalism to students from Bowling Green, the University of Toledo and Hillsdale College in our intern program. We will also look to incorporate area high schools in the area. We will be committed training future storytellers.
We will be transparent. The days of “sources close to say” are over (at least for us). We will also be nonpartisan. We will have an opinion section for the community to air their views, but we will not have our own. We will not endorse candidates but will give them the space to tell their stories.
We will also collaborate with funeral homes to offer free obituaries. We have a few now (Walker Funeral Homes and Coyle) and hope to get them all soon.
We want to be the place you go to find out anything in Toledo. Our agreement with WTOL as a news partner will also help us (and them) get the word out on stories that have high interest in the Toledo region.
Our goal is to create a quality newspaper you are used to. We want what’s best for Toledo, which is a great news source.
Please join us and become a member. Sign up to get our weekly newsletter and use the donate button to support us. We will be funded by our readers, grants and advertisers; that’s how this will work. We are delighted to be back and want you involved. Please keep reading us and support our team, if you can. This time, we will make history!
