Donna Barrett

By CNHI News Service

Donna Barrett, president and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings in Birmingham, Ala., is the new president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.

She was elected Monday at the group's 105th annual convention in Aventura, Fla., and is the fourth woman in SNPA history to hold the position.

Barrett succeeded David Paxton, president and chief executive office of Paxton Media Group in Paducah, Ky.

SNPA is a newspaper trade organization representing newspapers across the southern part of the United States.

Barrett had a clear message for the press and the public upon taking the SNPA reins: "The sky is not falling on the newspaper industry."

She said there are many developing opportunities and "we have to be bold enough to seize them and overcome the bad press that is swirling around our industry.”

Lately, according to Barrett, newspapers have been ignoring the whole picture of the state of the industry and focusing only on negative snapshots.

“Sometimes I think we are our own worst enemies. I read so much misinformation about our business, written by our own reporters,” she said. “As one example, stories about declining readership often ignore the fact that our total audience is actually growing. Online readers count. A mix of print and online makes a very healthy business model, especially when we consider that there are no paper and delivery costs involved with online, so it will require less revenue to support.”

Revenue is down for newspapers, Barrett said, but it’s down across all sectors of advertising-based businesses in the U.S.’s struggling economy.

“You would never know it when you read many of the reports in our own newspapers,” she added. “Nor would you understand how much of it is related to the overall economy. At some point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially when our advertisers buy in to the ‘dying industry’ story. In contrast, I don’t see television reporters grabbing the microphone on the evening news to give the audience incomplete and misleading information about the dire state of their business. We need to get the doomsday crowd out of the way so we can move our industry forward.”

Moving newspapers forward has been Barrett’s chief focus with CNHI, a privately owned holder of newspapers, television stations, Web sites and niche publications in more than 150 communities. She has been with the Birmingham, Ala.-based company since it was founded in 1997, and was chief operating officer for six years before becoming president and CEO in 2006.