by James O'Shea
When Cook named his successor, he didn’t look toward the newsroom. The financial impresarios he had hired from the world of investment banking and accounting convinced him that the most important mission for Tribune Company, on the cusp of its Wall Street debut, was to improve its productivity. A new generation of leadership took over, people who had never struggled to meet a deadline, web a press, or register a photo. Editors worked for them, not with them. This new breed attacked the wall between editorial and business, saying that editors used it not only to protect the public interest, but also to protect fat payrolls, excessive editorial budgets, inefficient operations, and outdated technology. They subordinated the newspaper’s public service mission to their goal of driving the returns of Tribune and other newspaper stocks into the stratosphere, making themselves and employees millionaires, developing close relationships with analysts and institutional investors who would come to own 70 percent of the stock of publicly held newspaper companies. They were doing what was expected of them, serving shareholders, journalism be damned. But the attacks simply increased resistance on both sides of the wall and generated the kind of misunderstandings that would become legion. Instead of developing strategies to produce the kind of content that would protect their most important asset—the public trust, they depreciated it like an aging Linotype. In early 1981, Cook anointed a plump, balding, tough guy from Toledo to succeed him. His name was Charles T. Brumback. He was an accountant—an expert on columns of numbers.
5
The New Order
Charlie Brumback beamed with pride as members of the Great Lakes Naval Station band struck up the “Chicago Tribune March” on the steps of the massive new staircase he had built—at the cost of $250,000—to link “upstairs,” the editorial department on the fourth floor of Tribune Tower, to “downstairs,” the business offices below. Newsroom staffers wandered over to the huge, glass-enclosed, three-story passage to sample ice cream and listen to the tune commissioned in 1892 to memorialize the newspaper. Ninety-three years later, the tune was music to Brumback’s ears for an altogether different reason. To complete the “Freedom Staircase,” a massive hole had been jackhammered in the floor of the newsroom in a not-too-subtle hint to the journalists on the fourth floor to get with the program.
In Brumback’s mind, the Chicago Tribune was a profit-churning business, not some highfalutin priesthood solely dedicated to truth, justice, and the First Amendment. If the paper didn’t make profits, there would be no journalism. Profits required teamwork, a concept that, Brumback thought, was alien to most journalists with their hold-your-nose attitudes about how the company made a buck. To make his point, the Tribune chief, a Korean War veteran and military school disciplinarian, physically connected the newsroom to the business offices. When the moment arrived, as a gaggle of slack-jawed journalists looked on in disbelief, Brumback cut the ribbon draped across the staircase in a symbolic move that heralded the dawn of a new era in upstairs-downstairs relations. The dedication of the Freedom Staircase in 1985 was typical of Brumback, a blunt, tough, callous accountant who in 1981 had been drafted to run the Tribune from the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune paper in Orlando, Florida.
As newspaper families sold off their inheritances, went public, and hired the bean counters of the world to deliver returns that would keep stock prices high and dividends flowing, professional managers—men trained as accountants or investment bankers—joined newspaper company staffs across America. Few of the new guard were as mean, intelligent, or hard charging as Brumback, though. Frugal, taciturn, and nearly bald, Brumback wore baggy blue suits and undistinguished brown shoes. In Florida, he had earned a reputation for turning off lights left burning after business hours. A Princeton graduate and native of Ohio, Brumback grew up in a comfortable suburb of Toledo. His bland demeanor and casual smile masked a quick, impatient mind. Dismissive and often harsh, Brumback would often cut subordinates off in midsentence; he once told Tribune employees doing page paste-ups that they were engaged in “idiot work”; he referred to a Tribune-owned tabloid in New York as “a paper for immigrants”; and warned another gathering of employees to take a good look at the person to the right and to the left, because by the end of the year, one of them would be gone.
Although he had graduated from one of the nation’s best colleges, Brumback didn’t tout his Princeton credentials. He attributed his success in business to the Culver Military Academy, the Indiana military high school he had attended. “Culver was more important to me than Princeton,” Brumback said with pride. “The culture at Princeton was a little different. It was really training people for Wall Street, government service, and large corporations. Culver prepared me to take responsibility for my actions and [understand] what leadership [was] all about. I learned the importance of creating an environment where people work together as a team to accomplish something.”
True to his military school roots, Brumback approached his new job at the Tribune like a general leading troops. On the whole, he considered the Tribune he took over in 1981 a flabby, undisciplined organization, one that was unable to capitalize on its considerable power because of poor leadership, backward technology, and a bloated payroll. Almost immediately, he forced the paper’s editor, Max McCrohon, out of his job and replaced him with Jim Squires, a former Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief and editor of the Orlando Sentinel under Brumback.
In addition to acquiring a militaristic attitude toward efficiently running organizations, Brumback had received a powerful lesson early in his career about how to effectively operate a newspaper.
I had a friend who was a son of Jack Knight. The Knight family owned a newspaper in Akron, Ohio, near Toledo, where I was living. I went to high school with Frank Knight, who . . . was my age and in my class. Before taking the job in Orlando, I went down and spent some time with Frank in Akron to get an understanding of the newspaper business. I told him that the newspaper business seemed to be very complicated and I wondered how in the world anyone could get a grasp of it.
He said, “Charlie, this is not a complicated business. All you got to do is step back and look at it as four separate, independent businesses working together under one roof. First you have the most important, which are the [editorial] content creators, the people who create the content of the newspaper that readers and subscribers will pay to read. These are the people advertisers want to reach. The quality of the content is extremely important. [But] these people are different. They are creative. They tend to be introverts. They are smart and they tend to stick together. You must realize they are different from others. If they are not different [from] your advertising people or your production people or your distribution people, you want to be careful.”
And then he said, “Successful advertising folks are different from reporters and editors. They are outgoing extroverts. They wear a big handkerchief in their coat pocket that sticks out and they walk around patting everybody on the back. They are salesmen. They sell advertising. They are nice people; they are nice to everybody. You need people like this to sell advertising.”
The third business under the roof—the production people, or those who actually manufacture the newspaper, “are not,” Knight told Brumback, “like editorial and advertising folks. Most don’t have college degrees.... Proofreaders, Linotype operators . . . paper handlers, mailroom and pressroom operators work with their hands and end most days with ink on their face, hands, and clothes. People who work in the production department are very important to the success of any newspaper.”
Knight compared producing a newspaper to:the manufacture of 25,000 one-pound cakes of ice an hour. A printing press takes in raw material [large rolls of newsprint] in one end and puts out 25,000 one-pound products an hour from the other [during a ten-hour press run]. And you’ve got to get . . . 250,000 [of those] one-pound cakes of ice delivered to 250,000 different locations [every day] before they melt. Because once a certain amount of time goes by, the newspaper has very little value. The product
ion process and the ability of your production people to create those 25,000 one-pound products an hour coming out of a press is extremely important.
Distribution was the fourth element in Knight’s model. Because the news’ relevance can melt like ice, Knight emphasized that the fourth business under the roof was important, despite its peripheral nature. Brumback recalled the way Knight had explained it. “You will find your distribution people are different,” Knight told him. “They get up in the middle of the night in all weather. For most of them, it is a second job. They are the people that deliver your newspapers to your customers. You need to spend time with them and get to understand how they do their work.” “This was the best advice I got before going to Orlando,” Brumback admitted. “It helped me understand newspaper publishing. It is important to understand that each of the four functions is staffed with four different types of people with four different types of skills.”
But there was one aspect of Knight’s model that Brumback failed to buy into: the separation of the editorial and business operations, a necessary division that, early on, established a wall between church and state to protect the integrity of the news from powerful advertisers who would lean on publishers when they didn’t like headlines.
Brumback hated the idea of a wall and dismissed it as a relic:Jack Knight [Frank’s father] was a genius, a marvelous newspaperman [who would go on to build the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, at one time America’s second largest]. But [Frank’s] Uncle Jim was different. Jack was Mr. Outside. He moved around. He was a good newspaper publisher but Jim was Mr. Inside, . . . the one who handled the business affairs of he newspaper.... The dual-headed form of organization worked for Jack and Jim Knight because they were brothers and Jack enjoyed . . . news gathering and editorial work and Jim was a good businessman. They divided up their business into what some people today call the business side and the editorial side. [But] I felt there had to be one person responsible for the entire newspaper. While a dual-headed organization worked well for Jim and Jack Knight, when that organization is transmitted to subsequent non-family generations, it tends to create barriers between all functions responsible for a successful operation.... I’m troubled when I hear someone talk about the “news side” and the “business side” of the newspaper. This divided organization is perpetuated mainly by editorial folks and, I think, it is taught in a lot of journalism schools. This model worked well for the Knight brothers during their lifetime, but it didn’t work well for their successors.
When the Colonel built the Tribune Tower, the elevator carrying ad salesmen, delivery men, accountants, and the corporate brass to their offices had been rigged so it wouldn’t even stop at the editorial department on the fourth floor. Even under the Colonel, who was a businessman to his core, editorial was considered the soul of the paper, a sanctuary where reporters and editors—though they might be subject to the Colonel’s antics—labored free from the pressures of commercial operations. The editorial department’s job was to create an audience by serving the public’s need and desire for information; the business side existed to sell ads to that audience.
But Brumback, a notorious miser who scrutinized every penny spent at the Tower, turned that formula upside down, arguing that a paper that didn’t make profits couldn’t afford to cover the news. Brumback’s attacks on the status quo didn’t stop at the newsroom door. In one way or another, he assaulted each of the four businesses Knight had outlined as key in a successful paper, dragging Tribune employees kicking and screaming into the modern age, arming them with computers, jettisoning some Tribune loyalists and rewarding others, and instilling a rigorous sense of discipline throughout the organization. Once, Brumback ordered all of the blinds on the windows of Tribune Tower to be lowered to the same level and then walked around the outside of the building to see who’d followed orders.
According to Brumback, he made clear to anyone who worked for him, including Squires, that regardless of title, they were executives whom he expected to be professional managers. “Editorial executives don’t like to be called managers,” Brumback noted. “They would rather be called editors. This is a quaint distinction that appears be to universal in the newspaper business. But that didn’t bother me. I looked on them—and they knew I looked on them—as managers and executives who had to manage their part of the business.”
Squires understood how to play the game; in Florida, he had cut a deal with Brumback that would dramatically affect the Orlando Sentinel and later the Tribune, one that Squires in retrospect described as a Faustian bargain: “[He] let me decide what goes in the newspaper, what its editorial opinions will be, what time it goes to press, and how it presents itself in the community, and I promised to run the tightest ship in the business. It was a deal designed to deliver both prizes and profits.”
Tribune Company had acquired the Sentinel from Martin Andersen, a high school dropout who lived large, enjoyed martinis, and idolized the Colonel. Brumback, who had been hired, fired, and rehired by Andersen, came along with the paper in what he described as a golden opportunity: “Orlando was a market in those days where our mistakes didn’t show. It was growing so fast that even if we made a mistake or did something wrong, it generally would be covered up by the growth of the market. But overall the company was strong. We had good management. We had good people coming up in the ranks, and it was a very well run and successful newspaper.”
During the four years Brumback and Squires ran the Sentinel, they increased the paper’s operating profit margins from the mid-teens, the industry average, to the low twenties, among the industry’s best. Budgets were set in order for profits to rise by 15 percent to 25 percent a year, and soon, Squires noted, the Sentinel’s contribution to the bottom line was nearly as much as that of the Tribune, which was three-and-one-half times its size. As editor, Squires became much more involved in the marketing of the paper than many of his contemporaries thought acceptable, but he also used the money he got out of Brumback to engineer an about-face in the Sentinel’s journalistic reputation. He was a pioneer in creating zones to target local news and advertising, and he redesigned the paper into clean, well-organized sections that delineated main news from local, business, sports, and features. True to his bargain with Brumback, Squires whacked the editorial department budget. At the time he assumed the helm, the editorial budget was 15 percent of the paper’s overall revenue. It fell exactly 1 percent a year between 1976 and 1980.
The results turned heads in Chicago, where Cook was preparing to take Tribune Company public, and when, in 1981, he named Brumback CEO of the Chicago Tribune Company, the corporate arm of its flagship newspaper, Charlie decided to bring his editorial ace along. Brumback saw padded staff, retarded technology, and subpar revenues in Chicago, too. But, he also encountered unions—organizations that were decidedly hostile to his capitalistic instincts, and ones that he would eventually crush. The troubles that faced the Chicago Tribune in the early 1980s plagued many other big-city newspapers. The Tribune had substantial revenues, but they were not growing, particularly once inflation was factored in. Papers that tried to raise circulation or advertising rates to compensate for sluggish growth fueled counterattacks from new media—television, radio, free newspaper shoppers, and direct mail—all of which were growing, charged less for ads, or had greater audience reach. So, newspapers kept the prices low to prop up their circulation and the myth that they were a medium with a mass audience.
Meanwhile, costs at big-city newspapers had soared thanks to inflexible work rules, onerous labor contracts, and bloated payrolls. Brumback saw staffing levels as the root of most problems. Soon after arriving at the Tower, he started slashing jobs and taking on the newspaper’s unions, arguing that the paper needed more efficient press runs and more flexibility in dealing with lifetime job guarantees, issues that rankled union leaders. Within a few years, the unions staged a strike, a dramatic miscalculation that the Tribune’s new general capitalized on with a ruthless counterattack that bro
ke their backs. “We had temporary replacements for all of the work necessary to produce the newspaper [when the strike started],” Brumback recalled. To compound the effects of this ready workforce, the drivers’ union, the Teamsters Union, didn’t honor the picket lines. As a result, Brumback could still successfully deliver the paper. Eventually, the scabs that had come in as short-term hires were slotted into permanent positions when the strikers disregarded the call to return to work under the proposed conditions. Brumback said:The replacements came from some of the Tribune’s other newspapers that were non-union. Others came from friends in the industry. . . . The out-of-town replacements were here up to a year. After a few weeks, we began to bring in young people right out of high school and college. We trained them to run the new technology equipment and within a few months we had a lot of well-trained workers.... Everybody that came in was told that this was a strike situation and it was temporary.... They were able to make extra money because they worked a lot of overtime. But then it became clear that the unions were not about to agree to our terms under any conditions. Finally we sent a registered letter to all of the strikers at their homes and told them that they had twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get back under the conditions that we proposed before they struck or they would be permanently replaced. They didn’t come back. They were getting bad information from their union leadership who didn’t want to acknowledge that they had lost the strike.... So we permanently replaced them.
