Press Lord 2.0
ONCE UPON A TIME, INDIVIDUAL impressive sonofaguns were the only ones who owned newspapers. Not public companies. Press lords. Men accountable only to their bankers and their ambitions. The press lords were eccentric weirdos with strong opinions about public life and the means to inflict those opinions on entire cities. Jack Knight of the Akron Beacon Journal, a playboy who became one of the 20th century’s most eloquent voices for press freedom, used his paper’s influence to end the great Akron rubber-factory strike of 1936. Henry Luce of Time thought Mussolini was an okay guy, and said so. The owner of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCormick, believed that FDR’s New Deal was secretly Trotsky’s doing. William Randolph Hearst dated chorus girls, ran for governor, and started a minor international war; he also defined the populist style of urban newspapering.
Hearst’s life was dramatized in the 1941 movie Citizen Kane, which tells the story of Charles Foster Kane, a fictional press lord who conquers the world yet dies alone in his vast castle, surrounded by thousands and thousands of objets d’art. With his last breath, he utters a single cryptic word: “Rosebud.” Everyone spends the movie trying, in vain, to learn what he meant. It turns out that “Rosebud” was Kane’s childhood sled. Although Citizen Kane is fiction, it speaks to the reality of American newspapers in the press-lord era. If you wanted to understand a particular paper — what it held sacred, what it ritually ignored — you had to understand the motivations of the man who owned it. The chip on the man’s shoulder, the mote in the man’s eye. The secret spur of the press lord. Rosebud.
The Inky took a backseat to no paper in the kooky-owner department: founded in 1829 by two idealistic Jeffersonians; sold, almost immediately, to a Bible publisher; sold to a British telegraph operator, then passed to the Brit’s whiskey-drinking, yacht-sailing son; sold in 1936 to Moses Annenberg, a skull-cracking Prussian immigrant who’d been a bully boy for Hearst and made his fortune publishing racetrack odds for Mafia bookies; passed from Moses to his shy, insecure son Walter in 1942; brought to editorial ruin by Walter, who kept a literal blacklist of Those Who Shall Not, Under Any Circumstances, Be Written About.
In 1970, Walter Annenberg sold the Inky to Jack Knight. Knight was the rare press lord content to hire good journalists and hand them the keys. While Knight continued to live in Akron — and while his company gradually morphed into the corporate behemoth that came to be known as Knight Ridder, echoing the broader transfer of power and ownership from press lords to public companies known as “chains” — Knight’s Inky editor, Gene Roberts, ran the show at 400 North Broad. Roberts was an accomplished and inscrutable ex-New York Times correspondent. He got to work hiring a brilliant staff. As his number two, he brought in Gene Foreman, a laconic Arkansas kid with a gentle drawl. The Two Genes nurtured reporters of large and still-forming talents — Bill Marimow, Donald Barlett, James Steele, Richard Ben Cramer — then set them loose. Under the Two Genes, Rosebud was a code of ethics. Rosebud was the 4 p.m. news meeting. With working journalists at the reins, the paper raked in 17 Pulitzer prizes.
It didn’t last. All over the country, the public newspaper chains were losing readers and advertisers to television. Then, while CEO Tony Ridder and the Philly papers slashed their staffs to cope with that reality, the Internet sneaked up from behind with a shiv. If anybody could publish a blog, who needed journalists? If advertisers could sell stuff more efficiently online, who needed print?
And then, at that bleakest of moments, a new type of press lord emerged, singing newspapers’ praises. The new press lord didn’t know the first thing about the newspaper business. He came from the world of philanthropy, or the entertainment industry, or sports, or insurance, or defense contracting. But he had mega-millions to burn. With swagger, he went after the big-game papers in the biggest cities: Los Angeles (philanthropist Eli Broad, music mogul David Geffen), Chicago (Hank Greenberg of AIG insurance), Boston (Jack Welch of GE), New York (Greenberg again).
Of course, here in Philadelphia, we don’t have any moguls quite that big. So when Knight Ridder sold out to a healthier newspaper company, McClatchy, and McClatchy decided to dump the newspapers in declining markets, including Philly ... well, we had to settle for a savior of hometown dimensions. He confused the hell out of us. Not because we didn’t know anything about him, but because we never pictured him doing this. And compared to a guy like Jack Welch, our guy couldn’t afford to piss away millions on some vanity project. It didn’t make any sense, which is why we all wanted, needed, to know: What’s the hidden motivation? What’s driving this guy? What’s the personal Rosebud of our own Citizen Tierney?
AT THE SOUTH END OF TIERNEY’S new office, there’s a beautiful sunroom, stocked with poinsettias for the season, that opens onto a wide balcony with a view of the Philadelphia skyline. Sometimes Tierney stands on the balcony and smokes a pipe. The pipe is a habit he picked up in college, taking classes at the Annenberg School. When he first bought the papers, he felt strange coming out here; strange to look down at Roman Catholic High, where his father went to school; strange to imagine his mother as a young student at Hallahan Girls’ School, walking past 400 North Broad every day, then, years later, working her hatcheck concession at the Marriott to save for Brian’s prep-school tuition, and all that time never dreaming, “as I wouldn’t have dreamt even a year ago,” that her son would ever be in the position to pick up where Walter Annenberg left off.
Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, April 2007.
