by James O'Shea
Brumback also forced significant changes in the newspaper’s inefficient distribution system in a convoluted agreement that forced him to spend about $45 million to regain control over routes that the paper technically owned—a payment he labeled a “disgrace.” But the deal enabled the Tribune to create a system of independent delivery contractors that was more efficient, improved customer service, and, of course, cut costs.
Brumback was no entrepreneur. He was a manager, a hired gun, and an expert in numbers. Prizes and awards didn’t impress him. But Brumback and Squires both realized long before their peers that the computer and the technological advances it heralded would revolutionize the delivery of information. In Florida, Brumback had been deeply impressed with how The Walt Disney Company, owner of Disney World in Orlando, had used technology to enhance its entertainment business. He had also mastered the Apple computer at home and incentivized his managers to adopt the new technology by offering a free computer to anyone willing to teach himself how to use it on his own time. In 1981, when he made the same offer at the Tribune and no one bit, he lost no time in removing the paper’s editor and ushering in Squires.
A gifted editor, Squires wanted to bring a more cosmopolitan approach to the Chicago Tribune’s news reports, whether it involved foreign, national, or even fashion coverage. “He thought big,” remembered Lisa Anderson, a New York native and former reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, whom Squires hired to write about fashion for the Tribune. “He told me he wanted to make the Chicago Tribune a world-class newspaper and to do that he needed sophisticated fashion coverage.”
The Tribune’s journalistic reputation grew with Squires at the helm. The paper’s parochial ways and tarnished reputation from the days of the Colonel and his successors were no more. As editor, Squires created the illusion of a paper with an expanding staff. For every two obscure middle-management editor positions he eliminated, Squires turned heads by hiring journalists with high-profile reputations, people like Douglas Kneeland, then the Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times, who then recruited fellow Times writer John Crewdson, a brilliant reporter from the paper’s Houston bureau, and Nicholas Horrock, a combustible investigative reporter who had worked at the Times and Newsweek magazine. He changed the focus, purpose, and direction of the paper toward deeper reporting, more ambitious coverage, and a more sophisticated view of the world.
During Squires’ initiative to beef up the Washington bureau, I landed my correspondent job in 1982. Meanwhile, he worked hard to open high-profile news bureaus in other cities across the nation and world. He folded the paper’s suburban and local news inserts, replacing them with a zoning scheme that could provide local news and advertising more efficiently and give the paper a more refined feel. “Brumback’s goal,” as Squires explained in a book he wrote about his Tribune career, “was to make more profit than last year, not just a little more but the most possible. When these goals collided, our respective rank within the company decided the outcome. His always took precedence over mine, no matter what.”
But Squires underestimated the difficulty of sustaining a journalistic shell game in which his high-profile hires and new bureaus obscured a squeeze on the newsroom budget. “I [became] a ‘smoke and mirrors magician,’” he said, “juggling from the right hand to the left, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and lying to myself and my staff about how successful we were.” To help finance his journalistic sleight of hand, Squires implemented policies that subordinated the interests of the reader to that of the advertiser, and focused his gun sights on the Chicago Sun-Times , the scrappy tabloid that was the Tribune’s only real competition.
Squires bragged:It was the last of the great newspaper wars on one of the greatest battlefields of them all.... It was an advertising driven contest in quest of the highest quality readers. We didn’t hire more reporters, or include more news or print any more papers. We just shifted available resources to a day when circulation and advertising rates were the highest to generate more revenue. And the higher demographic profile of our readers combined with better reproduction of the advertiser’s image by high-quality offset printing led to a better and more desirable response to advertising, tipping the balance to our side of Michigan Avenue once and for all.
Squires’ strategy enabled Brumback to live up to his part of the bargain and more. “Productivity accelerated. Production costs decreased because we had fewer people,” Brumback said. “The productivity per man hour skyrocketed, and within a couple of years, the Tribune became probably the most productive big-city newspaper in the country. And for several years, it was the most profitable newspaper in the country.” Thanks to the higher ad rates, revenue jumped, too, because the paper could charge for an audience that had the kind of demographics that advertisers loved.
The Tribune wasn’t the only paper with plunging production costs. Across America, newspaper productivity soared as professional managers replaced humans with machines. Squires noted:Between 1975 and 1990, newspaper production work-forces would be cut by 50 percent or more. Presses that once required ten to twelve workers would now run with six or seven. Typesetting that used to demand huge departments, employing from thirty to three hundred skilled, unionized craftsmen, would disappear completely. Paper handling and loading, which once required waves of manual laborers, was replaced by computerized conveyer systems, robotic cranes, and remote-controlled flatcars. Human photoengravers would be replaced by laser beams, and film processors by computer processes.
The decline in the cost of production of the newspaper was not as dramatic as it seemed. Technology enabled managers to shift work that was once done on the floor of the printing plant to the newsroom, just as editorial budgets came under equally intense pressure to be cut. The burden of producing the newspaper fell more heavily on the shoulders of editors, but it also made them more indispensable to the operation. Meanwhile, those coveted cash flow margins at publicly held newspaper companies jumped to the 20 percent range by the mid-1980s. Nowhere was the trend more evident than at Tribune Company. Brumback continued his string of thirteen straight years of improving profits, tripling margins at the Chicago Tribune in just eight years from the 5 percent to 10 percent range to the mid-twenties. Buoyed by the profits at its flagship paper, Tribune Company’s stock soared 23 percent a year, triple the average of the rest of the industry.
Although overall profits rose at a 23 percent clip in the five years after the company went public, revenues rose only 9 percent, putting pressure on Squires and others to squeeze their budgets to finance earnings growth. To Squires’ credit, the situation didn’t really affect me or most of my colleagues at the Washington bureau. When American sailors began escorting oil tankers threatened by Iranian missile attacks out of the Persian Gulf in the shadows of Iranian missile batteries along the Strait of Hormuz, I hopped on a plane bound for the Middle East to cover the “tanker war.” When the paper needed investigative profiles of George Herbert Walker Bush or Senator Robert Dole’s campaign for the White House, no expense was spared. With Washington as a base, I traveled America, writing stories about everything from the financial scandal that drove House Speaker Jim Wright from office to budget excesses in the Pentagon’s Los Angeles–class attack submarine program. Those kinds of stories brought the Chicago Tribune high-profile journalistic accolades, particularly a series of stories I did on the savings and loan scandal.
Squires didn’t fare as well, though. He faced incredible pressures to deliver budgetary miracles to meet a demand for higher and higher profits, pressures that would never cease. After he left the company, Squires blasted Tribune and the industry for its failure to reinvest in their newspapers to finance improvements that would have better served readers. “The profitability of newspapers,” he wrote, “has come to depend on an economic formula that is ethically bankrupt and embarrassing for a business that has always claimed to rest on a public trust: the highest profitability comes from delivering advertising sold at the highest rates in a paper containing
the fewest pages and sold for the highest possible retail price to the fewest high income customers necessary to justify the highest rates to advertisers.” Zeroing in on the hypocrisy of newspaper publishers who ask for special legal and political rights on the ground that they exist to protect the people’s right to know, Squires noted, “Nowhere does the Constitution define the ‘people’ as the predominantly white upper 30 percent of the population between twenty-five and fifty years of age who make $50,000 a year.”
Yet manipulating newsroom resources to maximize advertising revenues is how Squires battled the Sun-Times. Like many before and after him, Squires allowed his bosses to capitalize on his reputation as a solid, professional journalist, essentially ushering in the policies he later described as bankrupt. To Squires’ credit, he always pushed the staff to cover issues that affected the rich and poor—minority housing, Chicago’s bankrupt schools, the plight of the underclass, and corruption at City Hall. When Cook decided to step down, the two contenders for his job were John Madigan, the investment banker brought in to take the company public, and Brumback. Charlie often frustrated Squires with his miserly ways, but Madigan was someone Squires thought was far worse. “Squires never liked Madigan,” Brumback recalled. Squires said he openly campaigned against Madigan for the top job. Meanwhile, he made a speech to the board extolling Brumback’s business acumen, his value as a mentor, and his wisdom in leaving editorial decisions to journalists. “I just made the case that Madigan had never run anything. Actually, Charlie was a pretty easy sell. None of them [company directors] liked Madigan,” said Squires.
Instead of thanking Squires, Brumback reneged on a budgetary pledge he had made to his editor in order to post record profits. When he was named Cook’s successor, Madigan was given Brumback’s former job—Squires’ nemesis was now his boss. “There was no way for someone who had fought Madigan’s ascent to power as vigorously and openly as I had to remain a power at the newspaper,” Squires said. “I lost the war. I knew I was dead.”
Squires didn’t help himself with his remarkably prescient report, “Project Prosperity,” in which he urged Tribune to adopt new attitudes toward circulation and advertising, to invest its dollars in the company itself, and to abolish the industry’s reliance on advertising rate increases justified by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the industry-funded organization that certifies circulation totals.
After he wrote his report, one of Squires’ friends in the corporate office said Squires’ enemies, led by Madigan, used it to brand him a “dangerous heretic.” At the time, he was not even fifty. Despite his ego and his faults, he was a fine editor and leader, a man who had a vision for the paper that was bigger than himself. He acknowledged that in his drive to adjust to a new “business paradigm and to excel at cost cutting and profit making in exchange for total control of editorial policy and news content, . . . I stayed too long and accepted too many bonuses to make a martyrs’ list.” Nonetheless, he gave journalists a powerful object lesson in grappling with the real power of the press as we struggled to save the journalism that we cherished.
On his last day at the Tribune, Squires visited Brumback, who informed him that his problem was that he didn’t “talk like us.” When told in retrospect that Brumback admitted Squires would probably have been the better choice to run the company than Madigan, Squires laughed: “Well, at least the old son of a bitch finally admitted it. All he ever did was add up the numbers and turn out the lights. All of the ideas of what to do were mine.”
6
The Cereal Killer
Leo Wolinsky stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor of the Los Angeles Times, a maze of hallways and corridors that twist and turn like a pretzel before emptying into a large, bright atrium surrounded by the corporate offices of Times Mirror. The path from the cluttered, cramped newsroom with its frayed green carpet to the spacious corporate offices was so familiar to Wolinsky, he could have walked it blind. By 1996, he’d been at the Times for nearly two decades, had seen publishers and editors come and go, had survived putsches and coups, and had winnowed his way to the top as a managing editor in charge of the holy grail: page one. Steeped in the Los Angeles Times way of doing things, Wolinsky knew his way around the block. A natural newsroom politician, he was also a friend to many of the men and women who had toiled alongside him for years. Striving side by side to get the paper out everyday will teach you a thing or two about people, and Wolinsky was someone you could count on. Even more importantly, he had mastered a skill crucial in any newsroom: He knew the ins and outs of the production process; he was a pro who could get the paper out every day.
But in nearly twenty years at the Times, he’d never seen anyone quite like Mark Willes, who had summoned him to the sixth-floor meeting. In many respects, Willes was the Los Angeles Times equivalent of Brumback. Both were financial disciplinarians, and both had been recruited to their respective companies with the same mission: Cook had hired Brumback to improve productivity at Tribune Company; the Chandler family had brought in the evangelistic Willes from General Mills to be the CEO of Times Mirror and to do God’s work on the Los Angeles Times’ bottom line.
A meeting with the business side of the paper was nothing new; there’d been countless sessions with consultants over the years. But Willes and Kathryn Downing, the hopelessly challenged publisher, had engaged a new batch of consultants in a drive to increase the paper’s circulation from about 1 million daily to 1.5 million or more. Publishers and journalists around the country mocked Willes’ and Downing’s wellpublicized efforts. The golden era for newspapers was officially over: Most papers struggled mightily to maintain what circulation they had. Journalists and industry experts dismissed Willes’ drive to grow circulation by 50 percent as ludicrous. Under Willes’ and Downing’s leadership, the venerable Los Angeles Times looked downright silly. Within the newsroom, Downing was known as “Calamity Kate,” while CEO Willes was dubbed“Cap’n Crunch,” a derisive reference to his legacy at General Mills.
But Wolinsky had a more nuanced view of the new numbers man. For one thing, Willes respected the power of print journalism. Wolinsky recalled, “I had mixed feelings about Mark. He was always calling in the consultants with all kinds of crazy ideas. But he was also smart and engaging; he really loved being in charge of the paper. He had a vision. It may have been nutty. But at least he had a vision. He really believed in the newspaper. He said our future was squarely in print. He ignored the Internet, thought it was just a fad. You had this great feeling that here was a guy who really believed in us.”
On the hot morning Wolinsky was summoned to the so-called Salon, he was met with a scene worthy of a column all its own. A literal sniff test. As he later recalled,
I came into this room. There were a bunch of chairs. Michael [Parks, then editor of the Times] was there, a woman who ran HR [human resources], Kathryn, Mark was there. They were all sitting there looking at these canisters filled with shredded newspapers. They were clear, plexiglass, about a foot high, filled with shredded newsprint. One was the New York Times, one was, I think, the Wall Street Journal, and, of course, the Los Angeles Times. So the consultants told us to start smelling the newspapers, and you know what, lo and behold, the Los Angeles Times smelled the worst. That was our problem; that’s why we couldn’t sell newspapers. We didn’t smell as good as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Ours smelled worse because we had a higher percentage of recycled paper . . . it smelled like fish.
Wolinsky and his colleagues suppressed laughs as they listened to the consultants’ take on the situation: Most Angelinos, sitting down for breakfast didn’t want to pick up a newspaper that smelled like fish. But there was a solution, the consultants crowed: They could make the paper smell like Starbucks and coffee cake. And so it went.
Working for the former head of General Mills—a man mystified by the staff ’s reverence for Otis Chandler—anything could happen. Willes had been hired in May 1995, about a decade and a half after Otis had stepp
ed down as publisher of the paper with a dazzling record that had earned him a well-deserved reputation as an icon of contemporary American journalism. Otis had left the publisher’s office at the relatively young age of fifty-three, fed up with the backbiting ways of his hidebound conservative relatives. They were, in Otis’ words, a “pain in the ass.” He told his biographer, Dennis McDougal,When I came into management, our pre-tax profit was somewhere around $2 to $3 million and I took it to $100 million. I took it [the company] to $1 billion in total revenues. That’s one hell of a growth. And the non-Chandlers appreciated it. But I only got one compliment in all those years from the entire Chandler family. One of them said, “Thank God, cousin Otis, you worked so hard. We really appreciate what you did.” They’re just not that kind of people. It wasn’t the editorial policy. They just couldn’t bring themselves to give compliments. They’re not built that way.
Wolinsky joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times three years before Otis stepped down as publisher. But Wolinsky didn’t see Chandler often, and when in January 1981, Otis, a man who was always cool to the touch, became chairman of the board of Times Mirror, he withdrew into the newsroom shadows, deferring decisions involving his beloved paper to his successors. Eventually, a new generation of journalists arrived, clueless about the tensions that would surface in the imminent struggle at the paper. “Younger staff members took their editorial freedom for granted,” McDougal observed in Privileged Son, a biography of Otis Chandler, “ascribing only token credit to the tall, fit and shy grandfather whom they occasionally ran into while waiting for the elevators or standing in line for the daily gourmet buffet in the executives’ Picasso Room cafeteria.”
