Family-owned newspapers can still work

In this year of consolidation in the newspaper industry, Gannett, New Media Investment Group and Tribune Publishing have scooped up dozens of titles in the name of efficiency. That makes the family-owned Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C. an outlier — and proud to be one.
The Post and Courier has clearly been on a roll editorially, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in April with high impact coverage in 2014 of domestic violence and the weak South Carolina laws to stop it. Since then the paper has responded strongly on a police killing of an unarmed man in North Charleston, followed by horrific shootings after a church prayer meeting, and the decision to remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol.
But the Post and Courier has business tricks up its sleeve as well — enough that top executives John Barnwell and P.J. Browning were asked to give the keynote Saturday at an Inland Press Association conference in Chicago for family owners.
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