The (Pottstown) Mercury, July 16

Mercury publisher, Pfeifer, steps down

By Evan Brandt
Of The Mercury

Anyone who knows Mercury Publisher Dennis Pfeiffer — and given the depth of his community service, there are a lot of people who do — will probably shake his or her head at the idea that he is retiring.

That’s because he isn’t.

Although Pfeiffer will leave The Mercury July 21 after 30 years with either The Mercury or its sister publication, The Penny Pincher, he’s not exactly the retiring type.

“I’m leaving to pursue some real estate projects and when they’re done, I’ll probably find something else to do,” said Pfeiffer, 56. “I may be retiring from the newspaper business, but I don’t know if I’d call it retiring.”

After all, his career has been too interesting to retire just yet.

A 1967 graduate of Boyertown High School, Pfeiffer grew up in Fagleysville and was trained as a technical illustrator at the former Industrial Management Institute in Reading.

After serving in the Army National Guard, Pfeiffer said “I got out and found out there weren’t too many jobs in technical illustrating.”

So his artistic background landed him a job with Thriftway Foods of King of Prussia “laying out food ads.”

The man who gave him that job was Jim Corum of Pottstown, who was the advertising director there. It was here that Pfeiffer began his steady climb; first to assistant ad director under Corum, then on to selling advertising with Montgomery Publishing.

In 1975, he made the jump to The Mercury where he sold ads in the Exton area and then in his old stomping grounds in Boyertown.

He rose from assistant retail manager to retail sales manager to advertising director and then, in 1988, started the Penny Pincher publications.

In 1995, “I was asked back as advertising director” and then in 1998, the newspaper was purchased by the Journal Register Corp., its current owner.

The company offered Pfeiffer his first publishing post, heading up the Acme Newspaper group in Ardmore. There, Pfeiffer was responsible for the publication of the Main Line Times, Germantown Courier, Mount Airy Express, the four zoned editions of The News of Delaware County and the Town Talk newspapers.
But he wasn’t there long.

By 1999, Pfeiffer was back at the helm of The Mercury, where he has been ever since.

In more than 30 years in the industry, Pfeiffer said perhaps one of the biggest changes he has seen is improvements in technology.

“When I first came to The Mercury, they were still using hot metal to make type and now we do complete pagination on computers and send those images directly to the plates” on the printing presses, he said.

Another change evident among newspapers is the purchase of them by publicly traded companies, like Journal Register Corp., “and we’ve seen the whole clustering concept take hold,” he said in reference to the practice of buying neighboring newspapers and pooling their resources.

“That provided the ability for us to improve the quality of our newspaper,” he observed. “There’s no way we would have been able to build a printing facility like we have in Exton just for The Mercury.”

The Internet has provided another major shift in the way newspapers operate, and will continue to have an effect, Pfeiffer observed.

“Newspapers have to embrace the Internet more than they have,” said Pfeiffer. “We haven’t missed the boat, but we haven’t led the charge either.”

He agreed that as the Internet matures and the endless sources of news cause information overload, people are beginning to realize that the best information comes from the same place it always did, organizations that confirm their facts.

“The Internet is not going to replace us, we just need to find our place in it. I don’t think it will be too long from now that you will be able to buy a subscription to an electronic version of just about any newspaper,” Pfeiffer said.

As for this specific newspaper, Pfeiffer said, “I think The Mercury has changed since I’ve been here. We’ve tried to improve our relationship with the community.”

“We’re still the watchdog, but I don’t think we’re quite as ruthless as we had been, and I think that’s made us more respected today in the community than we had been,” he said.

As for Pfeiffer himself, the respect he has earned in the community is evidenced by the long list of community organizations with which he has been involved, and ended up heading.

He has been involved in Ambucs, the old Downtown Pottstown Business Association and its more current incarnations, the Pottstown Downtown Improvement District Authority and the Pottstown Downtown Foundation, which, until recently, he headed.

Pfeiffer was the first non-builder president of the Building Industries Exchange, a 20-year veteran of the BIE’s Home Show Committee, a member of the borough’s Economic Oversight Committee and he chaired the committee that oversaw the celebration of Pottstown’s 250th anniversary.

Despite his apparent excitement about taking on his latest projects in real estate, Pfeiffer said the decision to leave The Mercury “was not an easy decision. I explained it to someone as being like trying to decide if I want to donate a kidney to someone,” he said, adding, with a laugh, “and it wasn’t my kid.”

Nevertheless, the decision has been made and Pfeiffer said he has made his peace with it, saying simply, “it’s time.”

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