A wise old
newspaper editor — it may have been Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but I’m not sure — was once asked by a journalism
student if the editor was the key to a good newspaper. He shook his head.
Nope, he
told the kid, the most important person in a good newspaper isn’t the editor,
or even the publisher. It’s the owner. Without an owner who’s willing to spend
money on news coverage and stand up to threats, no editor, however good, can
accomplish much.
If it was
indeed Bradlee who said that, he spoke from experience. His owner was Kay
Graham, and she was a great owner. Nothing lasts forever, and the Post is now under the ownership of Jeff
Bezos, the founder of Amazon. So far, from what I’ve read, he seems willing to
spend money and try different things, but the jury is still out on whether
he’ll attain great-owner status.
All in the Family
Great
newspapers have typically been a labor of love for families that had been in
the business a long time and regarded the paper as an extension of their
identity. I’m thinking here of families like the Grahams of the Post; the Ochs and Sulzbergers of the New York Times; the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times, and the Binghams of
the Louisville Courier-Journal.
And, to be
fair, there were always plenty of terrible family-owned newspapers, where the
crusading spirit of the founder had long since faded away, and the descendants
were content to make no waves and cash the quarterly dividend checks.
From the
1960s to the 1980s a great many family papers were bought by large chains,
which saw their monopoly on a local advertising market as something worth a
premium. In a few instances, the chains made the paper better (if for no other
reason than it could hardly have gotten worse) by bringing a scintilla of
professionalism to it.
In most
cases, though, the chains were content to cut the staff, cut other expenses,
and raise advertising and circulation rates to a level that a local owner would
have blushed at. The customers might not have liked it, but for years those
papers were cash cows generating profit margins of 30-40 percent, sometimes
more.
Gone Are The Days
The
Internet killed all that, beginning in the mid 1990s. The newspaper business
will never again be a place where you could almost put a chimpanzee in charge
of the operation, and still sit back and collect hefty rents from the
advertisers and subscribers. The gutting of the old business model, though, has
rained on the just and the unjust alike.
There are a
few weekly papers and small-town dailies that are still doing all right, and
that have owners who care about the paper and what it means to the community.
But of the four owners I mentioned earlier, only the Sulzbergers are still
running the paper as a family operation. The Times is the best there is now, but it’s limping along financially.
A lot of
smart people don’t think newspapers will be around much longer, and if
something comparable were rising to take their place, I wouldn’t worry too much
about that. Some day the Times may no longer exist, or will exist without the
Sulzbergers, whom I think of as the last good owners, in some greatly
diminished form. All I can hope is that it doesn’t happen for a long time, and
that I’m not around when it does.
