Mr. Media Interviews  

Good 'Ol Times: Mason Dixon Marks 30 Years On The Air

By WALT BELCHER The Tampa Tribune March 23, 2008 ST. PETERSBURG - The week always begins with "Blue Monday" and ends with "Friday on My Mind." In between are jokes, parody songs, rock 'n' roll standards, patriotic salutes to the troops, prize giveaways, the occasional "Polka Challenge" and large doses of self-deprecating observational humor from Mason Lee Roy Pee Wee Bodine Moon-Pie (and any other Southern name you like) Dixon. Every weekday morning, Dixon gives his take on the news: "You can tell its spring. Robins are building nests in Donald Trump's hair." "Poor old Sarah Jessica Parker. Maxim magazine voted her the unsexiest woman in the world. You think she is upset - I had $50 riding on Rosie O'Donnell." "The producers of 'Desperate Housewives' have ordered Eva Longoria to cover up the tattoo on her finger so viewers won't see it. The big news here is that the producers think viewers are looking at her fingers." Nearly 40 years ago, Jimmie Crawford, a good ol' boy from Memphis with musical savvy, started calling himself Mason Dixon (as a symbolic reference to the cultural differences between the northern and southern states). It has become one of the most recognizable monikers in the Tampa Bay area because Dixon has been entertaining radio audiences here for three decades. He also is known throughout the broadcast industry and has rubbed elbows with just about every veteran pop and rock performer in the country, from Olivia Newton-John and Paul McCartney to Cher and Rod Stewart. Dixon celebrated 30 years on the air earlier this month with his pals on the "Mason & Bill in the Morning" show on St. Petersburg radio station Q105 (WRBQ, 104.7 FM). "After nearly 40 years in radio and 30 of them in the Tampa area, it is still fun to come in and do this everyday," says Dixon, 58. "You can't talk about the history of Tampa Bay radio without including Mason Dixon; he's earned a place along with other legends like Jack Harris, Tedd Webb or the late Scott Robins," says Clearwater-based author and media expert Bob Andelman. Andelman, who runs the Mr. Media website, is a former newspaper and magazine columnist who covered Tampa radio in the 1980s and '90s. "I clearly remember the first day I came to Clearwater in 1982 and was stuck in traffic for an hour and a half," Andelman recalls, "I stumbled on Mason's afternoon drive show, and I had never heard anything like it. It was fast; it was fun. He was doing his 'Friday Festivities,' and it was great." Click HERE to Keep Reading!

I was passing by a newsstand in Manhattan's Penn Station earlier this week and I saw this magazine cover. "WTF?" I went back and looked again. Then I laughed and laughed. This is a magazine on a roll! If you saw the nude Lindsay Lohan cover a few weeks earlier and inside spread, you know what Mr. Media means. But if not, check out this 2008 cover gallery. © 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

If you think Fox TV is edgy and kooky now, you should’ve seen it back in the early ‘90s when Stephen Chao was a programmer and eventually its President.

He commissioned “COPS,” created “America’s Most Wanted,” and earned a reputation for creating commercial success by pushing boundaries and questioning the conventional wisdom. Chao rose to president of Fox Television and later held the same position at USA Cable where he launched “Monk.”

He dropped from sight for a few years. I hear he did a lot of surfing, and he’s now back in a new medium promoting a website, wonderhowto.com. If you want to see videos such as “Make Your Desk a More Creative Space” or “Increase Boob Size on Pictures with Photoshop” -- yes, I did like that one myself -- check out wonderhowto.com. STEPHEN CHAO AUDIO!
Click to open separate window

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.

Subscribe to Mr. Media's RSS Feed.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’m sure this is what everybody who runs into you asks this question. But, okay, why on earth did you get a man to remove all his clothes at a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney?

STEPHEN CHAO: Do I really have to go into that, Bob?

ANDELMAN: So much time has passed, Stephen. It must be easier to talk about.

CHAO: Let’s see. Let’s count how much time. 1992, 2002, 2008 – that would be 16 years.

ANDELMAN: Yes. And I noticed that The New York Times, when they profiled you a few weeks ago, referred to it, but they didn’t explain it, and that’s the thing I’ve always wondered about. It’s a bit of notoriety that will live with you forever. And here we are so I was kind of curious to ask.

CHAO: Okay. Actually, to tell you the truth, Bob, this is the first time I’ve actually ever spoken to it with any publication or medium or anything, but since you’re polite, I’ll answer the question.

The answer is I was giving a speech on standards and practices, and it was a speech that was meant to illustrate the trade-offs between the different standards and practices we have in America as it relates to violence on the one hand and nudity on the other. Both of those are big hot points in the media. They always have been, and they still are today. And I was citing an example of Dutch television, which had liberated itself from certain constraints. They said “Nakedness really isn’t that big of an issue, but violence, that’s a really bad issue. That’s anti-social.” So all of a sudden -- and this was 1965 that Dutch television did this -- they said, “We’ll allow nakedness starting now, and we’re going to ban violence starting now.” And, of course, that’s a pretty radical move for any government or television operation to do because it’s a complete switch, and it’s a switch very much like the way it would be a switch today in America, which is that we happen to accept violence on television. We do not happen to accept nudity. And so the question was kind of just a theoretical. Which is better, which is worse for society? Nakedness on the one hand versus violence and killing on the other. So I had a prop, as it turned out, to demonstrate a particular point, and it didn’t go over particularly well. And that’s the end of that story, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Did anyone besides you know what you were going to do, and did anyone try to talk you out of it?

CHAO: I guess the answer to that would be no. No one knew. That’s correct. No one knew.

ANDELMAN: I’m really glad I asked you about it. It was the kind of thing that interested me. I could see myself, a younger version of me, doing something like that to make the same type of point.

CHAO: Exactly. Yeah.

ANDELMAN: And then looking back now and saying, “I don’t know what I was thinking, but it seemed like the smart thing to do then.”

CHAO: To tell you the truth -- and this is an indication of the difference between you and me -- I don’t think I’ve gotten any wiser since then, so I’m pretty much the same person. I would probably do it just as innocently today and go, “What? What’s wrong?” And that would be that.

It was an interesting point. It was backed up by facts and situation and experience that happened in 1967 on Dutch television. It was kind of a landmark situation in Holland, and it was just meant to be a provocative point. I probably, in retrospect, nothing would’ve happened to me if I didn’t have that naked male, but such is life.

ANDELMAN: Do you think it would’ve gone over differently if it had been a naked woman?

CHAO: Yes. That, in fact, was very much a very good point. I don’t know if there’s anything left that can happen. You either get fired, or you don’t get fired. I chose a man for purposeful reasons as opposed to a woman because I think we accept a naked woman. We really don’t accept a naked man. So I don’t know. It was a choice on purpose. It was meant to be provocative. I hadn’t really given it… I just haven’t given it much thought since the incident since you asked me now 16 years later. I know that I chose a man and not a woman in that situation. That’s the only way I can answer that question.

ANDELMAN: I’m thinking about it. Murdoch’s newspapers, of course, have run topless pictures of women for years so I would think that might’ve gone under the radar, but I guess the man...

CHAO: Well, to be fair to Rupert…

ANDELMAN: But you don’t have to be.

CHAO: No, I don’t have to be, but I think he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s pretty consistent, and I don’t consider him, frankly, hypocritical. If you’re referring to naked pictures, what happens in England, for example, on page 3 of The Sun, that’s a different culture, and in true standards and practices, not that a speech in Aspen is governed by standards and practices necessarily or the rules of English media or the rules of American media, but to be fair, yes, you do it in English media. That’s something you do. In truth, would you put a naked person on in American media? And the answer to that is no, you wouldn’t do that in a newspaper, and you wouldn’t do that on a TV show. You might, if you were Stephen Chao, make a provocative point in a conference and behind closed doors, but it is a different culture, and so you can’t import that culture and that standards and practices to America and therefore, label him hypocritical or not cause it’s just apples and oranges all the way around.

ANDELMAN: Stephen, take me back to your days as a programmer and as a president at Fox, the early days of Fox. What kind of things were on the air then?

CHAO: That was 16 years ago so I’m taxing myself right now. I think there were things like “Women in Prison” and “Boys Will Be Boys” and -- what was that woman talk show? Joan Rivers. And then there was a little bit of bubble at 7:00 on Sunday in the form of “Jump Street,” which wasn’t really working, but it was doing okay. In truth, Sunday night and Saturday night weren’t doing okay at the time. And then there was a show that wasn’t moving very much, that wasn’t getting any appreciation, named “Married With Children,” and this was, of course, all before “The Simpsons” was there. So that’s what was on the schedule then.

ANDELMAN: You get credit for commissioning “COPS” and creating “America’s Most Wanted.” What else did you put on the schedule at that time?

CHAO: I was really interested in exploring what I thought was a new way to turn up the volume on dating so I launched a show called “Studs,” which actually got me in some trouble also. But it was, commercially, quite successful, and it was making an awful lot of money. It had a very quick start. I made a lot of specials, and I made a lot of shows, or my division did, at Fox. So we were making five hours a week for Fox Broadcasting Company. But the other show that stands out, mostly in terms of just kind of in retrospect, it was “Studs.” I just thought that, again, you have to go back to 1991 to have the context, but the most successful show at the time in the dating area was “Love Connection,” and it was really good. There was just plenty of room to make it more fun and carry on in the kind of double-entendre, racy tradition that “The Newlywed Game” had many years before that. I thought we could just do that same kind of thing in a contemporary way where the male was the victim of the joke, so to speak, between 2 or 3 women. And it wouldn’t be so much conceptual fun to step on the ego of women. It would be an awful lot of fun to step on the ego of men, and that was really the idea behind “Studs.” And it took off and worked and was a lot of fun.

After that, I shifted and ran Fox Television and Fox News, so I was out of the production business at a certain point.


ANDELMAN: Those early days of the Fox TV network, it was kind of a wild, wild West. There was some very unusual fare that got on the air, and I say it with respect because I enjoyed it. My wife and I, I don’t know if she wants me to drag her into this, but my wife and I watched those shows because it was so different. It was such a different time. I kind of wondered what was the programming philosophy at that time? What were you looking to do?

CHAO: Behind the scenes, as is the case I would suspect in most good start-ups, it was kind of desperate in many ways, and so it was a combination of desperately looking for any signs of life and Nielsen ratings and reaction, versus the other side, which is what you want it to be, which is more of this open field of creative experimentation. It’s a combination of really, really trying hard and the combination of really being terrified when things aren’t working. So that’s a nice combination. It’s a lovely place to be, between happiness and despair. A lot of things were experimented on, and out of that, again, just to go back, which is what you’re asking, to go back in history, “COPS” came out of nowhere. “America’s Most Wanted” came out of nowhere. They had no antecedent, so to speak.

At the time, everybody said, “Wow, ‘Hill Street Blues.’ It’s so realistic.” And, today, that’s frankly a laughable statement that people would say, “I really look to ‘Hill Street Blues’ to understand the psyche of cops and the psyche of victims and perpetrators and stuff like that,” because, of course, once you get to “COPS,” it’s like, “What was that cartoon they called ‘Hill Street Blues’? What did that have to do with life?” So it was very interesting because it came out of the blue, it had no antecedent, and it just smashed onto the scene as a completely original television idea. And I don’t mean to give “COPS” in the form of Frederick Wiseman, who did documentaries about cops which, by the way, we luckily were too stupid and ignorant to have known about, but they were similar cinema-verite kind of efforts many years before. It’s a lovely combination of experimentation, of ignorance, of having a budget to spend, and really being open-minded to what might or might not engage the national audience.

I think all those factors made it very interesting, and I think that those are factors one really tries to find in life because it’s not too much fun if you get too successful, and it’s not too much fun if you hit too much failure. So I guess it had just the right combination of things. And, by the way, you have to pick your right moment in life. Namely, you can’t say, “I’m going to launch a fifth network,” which 2 people did, and expect there to be enough of a marketplace for that. Now, it’s easy to say in hindsight, but at the time, prospectively, when either CW or Time Warner were being launched, you go, “It’s getting kind of thin. Do you really want to divide the pie up between 6 networks plus syndication?” And the answer is, “Wow, that’s kind of slicing it kind of thin.”

At the time when Fox was started, and, again, it’s a combination of creative programming strategy and smart business strategy. You have to say, “It’s been dominated by the big three. There is this group of stations called the Metromedia stations that could be the core of a new network. The big three incumbents are really kind of traditional. Their timing and their scheduling is kind of traditional. They don’t have a 10 o’clock news. There’s vulnerability. We are only required to do fewer hours. There’s all kinds of opportunity in that situation in terms of advertising, in terms of market, in terms of station groups, in terms of creative ideas. So you look at that, and you look at the larger market, which is basically what Rupert did before he bought the Metromedia stations, and he said, “You know what? I think there’s room here for a fourth network.” So you have to make the big, overall, broad-stroke judgment of it, and then you have to dive in with every piece of smarts you’ve got in every category of advertising, program development, distribution, promotion, everything. But the first stroke is, is the market there? And that stroke was chosen and decided by Rupert very bravely when he decided to buy the Metromedia stations. That was the real beginning of the Fox network.

ANDELMAN: How much pressure was there on the programming side by the people controlling the money at Fox, whether that be Rupert or people working for him? Was there a lot of pressure to perform, or was there a window to experiment and see what might work for a few seasons?

CHAO: I would say, to Barry Diller’s credit, I think there was a lot of pressure on him, but I think what he did is truly the sign of a great manager, which is he kept none of that pressure or transferred none of that pressure to anybody in the program department. And he really said look, you need a carte blanche to be creative and to really think of something interesting. And he didn’t say, “I need money, I need ratings, I need advertisers.” He compartmentalized that and just said, “Do something good.” So the answer is no, there wasn’t pressure. I’m sure there was in some certain areas where there appropriately should’ve been, but in shaping and fostering a creative enterprise, you just have to know when to draw the line.

ANDELMAN: Did you continue to have any relationship with Barry Diller over the years once you were out of Fox?

CHAO: Yes, I was hired twice subsequently - once to help Q2 and QVC and subsequently to run USA. So three different times I’ve worked for him in my life.

ANDELMAN: Wow. I didn’t know that.

CHAO: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: I know that you probably want to talk about your website.

CHAO: I do indeed. You’re a mind reader, Bob.

ANDELMAN: I know that -- but we have some time, and there’s a couple things to touch on, and we’ll come to that. I’m also very interested in what have you been doing since you left USA? I didn’t know about your involvement with QVC, but for the most part, people who watch media haven’t really seen much of you in the last 6 or 7 years. How have you been spending your time?

CHAO: Let’s see. I’ve been a private investor so I’ve bought and sold some companies, not necessarily in the media business. One that I’m particularly fond of that my friend ran was called Helios Nutrition. It was a kefir company so it was a natural foods kind of thing that was in all of the big good stores like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, and it was really successful as an alternative to yogurt. That’s one thing that I did. I just choose ideas and situations that I find engaging. I can’t say that I have to be in the media business. That’s not a requisite when I make choices, although I happen to like the media. I think it’s lots of fun, but it’s not a prerequisite.

ANDELMAN: But was I off-track when I suggested you’ve been doing a little surfing?

CHAO: Well, I’ve gotten pretty decent at surfing. It happens to coincide with my kids. I have a couple of kids. They’re 16 and 13 so the occasion to surf is kind of a magical thing because when you’re a 16-year-old boy, how much time do you really choose to be with your dad? And if dad’s a decent surfer, takes you to kind of really decent spots, and drives you there, dad’s pretty good. So it was really fun to be able to surf and get pretty good at it. I’m pretty good would be an exaggeration. I don’t want to say that. I’ve gotten decent at it.

ANDELMAN: So you’re not “John from Cincinnati” decent at it?

CHAO: I’m okay, actually. I really love it. It’s really a remarkable sport for me. I used to like skiing or snowboarding, but then the idea that you can go into the ocean without any equipment or artifice and just have a surfboard, I just can’t think of any sport like it. So I happen to really, really love the sport.


Click Here to Keep Reading!

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

"I'd do everything to a woman of AARP age, and have. In fact, every year I like to cover a very broad spectrum.'"

-- Jack Nicholson, answering the musical question, "Would you date a woman of AARP age?" when asked by AARP magazine's Nancy Griffin.

Technorati Tags:
Jack Nicholson, AARP Magazine, Nancy Griffin, elder sex

My Soul's Journey

To let go of the fear and anger which imprisons my heart,
To relinquish all childish expectations and live joyfully in the
world as it is = =
not as I wish or imagine it to be,
To be free of the always craven and ever-craving ego,
To be released from the endless hungers of the body,
To see God in others,
To see God in everything,
To die without death and merge my consciousness into the
cosmic sea of bliss from which I came,
To crank out two sitcoms a week that can compete
with a deaf chick dancing her ass off . . .
This is my soul's journey.



Technorati Tags:
Chuck Lorre, The Big Bang Theory, Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Leonard Hofstadter, Sheldon Cooper, Bill Prady, Dancing With The Stars, Marlee Matlin

With $2.6 billion in assets, the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the 22nd largest foundation in the United States. Its mission is the betterment of the 26 communities in which it works and the promotion of journalism as a career and industry nationwide.

The latter part of Knight’s mission is particularly challenging at a time when traditional newspapers are shrinking and, in many cases, evaporating.

That puts Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and a former publisher of the Miami Herald, at the same crossroads that silent movies encountered with talkies, talkies with radio, radio with television, television with cable, and now traditional print journalism with online reporting, blogs, podcasting, v-logs, streaming media, and so on.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. It has a vital interest in seeing journalism survive in whatever form it takes.

I interviewed Ibargüen recently for an old media business magazine and liked his approach to a rapidly changing world, and I was delighted when he accepted my invitation for a second round of conversation. ALBERTO IBARGUEN AUDIO!

Click to open separate window

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.

Subscribe to Mr. Media's RSS Feed.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Reading the newspaper this morning, I see we’ve got more bad news in the business. Even The New York Times is talking about cutting 100 jobs.

ALBERTO IBARGUEN: It’s something like eight percent of their newsroom, yes. They’re certainly not immune from the drop in national advertising and the drop in jobs and jobs/classified advertising. Those are two traditional mainstays of newspapers. They represented, for most newspapers, well over half the revenue, and both of those categories are way down.

ANDELMAN: How do we square what’s happening, like the announcement at The New York Times today, for example, about 100 jobs -- with the amount of money that someone like Rupert Murdoch is pouring into The Wall Street Journal all of a sudden? How do those two square with each other?

IBARGUEN: I don’t think anybody else could possibly have paid that much for The Wall Street Journal or for any newspaper because that’s not, I think, the reason why Rupert Murdoch was so interested in Dow Jones. I think Rupert Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones because he’s starting a competitor to CNBC, and Rupert Murdoch is as committed to news online as anyone else in big media. I’d say more so. So what he was buying was not the newspaper. What he was buying was the best news organization around, and so I would expect that, over time, those resources and that talent, when the talent is enormous at The Wall Street Journal for covering business news, it is a great newspaper, that that talent will be applied on television and online.


ANDELMAN: So as far as print journalism goes, that was actually a pessimistic purchase rather than an optimistic purchase.

IBARGUEN: It’s hard to call that much money pessimistic, but I guess you’re right.

ANDELMAN: What about, if we move further West with that, what about Sam Zell and him buying the Chicago Tribune, plus the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel? He doesn’t have that same kind of online or electronic package, or does he?

IBARGUEN: No, I don’t think it’s the same, and I’m not sure that the deal is the same either. That one engaged a great deal, I think, of employee money. I don’t know if it was their retirement funds. I know that the Tribune Foundation became a contributor to that purchase. I think, in Chicago, the Tribune Company has long had lots of synergy with television and online, and I’m honestly not on the inside so I don’t know how they’re doing with that. In their smaller papers, they may be able, at least for a period of time, and Sam’s in Ft. Lauderdale here in Florida or in Orlando, they may be able to do reasonably well. They are, traditionally, newspapers that were run at very high margins, much, much more profitable on a percentage basis than say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they really did also depend on classified advertising and national advertising.

I think the picture for the national papers is actually not bad if they can figure out the online piece because online is part of the worldwide web, not the local, geographically defined web. And by thinking of it as a national paper, you can begin to have the kind of national scale that the web seems to be naturally suited for.

The ones that I think are also probably okay, at least for the short-term, are the papers in very small communities where they still can publish the local news, whether it’s the high school football team or what happened at city hall. They can do that better than anybody else. The ones that are really getting squeezed are the so-called major metros, and that would include the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, even the Los Angeles Times because those regional papers are trying to do something in between the national scope that fits the web so well and the very local, local, almost neighborhood scope that the small town dailies are doing. So those are the ones that you’re seeing the biggest stress on, and there are some like the Boston Globe, a great newspaper, that although it made some money last year, I think the year before, they actually lost money. That would’ve been unthinkable five or 10 years before.

ANDELMAN: It seems like the smart move 20 or 25 years ago was for these major metros, the Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, and so forth across the country, to add regional editions and grow and spread out, but now we see some of that coming back, and maybe that wasn’t the way to move long-term.

IBARGUEN: Yes, hindsight’s wonderful, isn’t it?

ANDELMAN: I thrive on it, frankly. Yes.

IBARGUEN: We’re so smart after the fact. I don’t know what they could’ve done. When you were doing your introduction, you were talking about being in the position of the talkies with silent films and so forth. It actually was the position that Jack Knight, our founder, the founder of Knight Foundation, that Jack Knight found himself in at the beginning of the century when he actually built the second biggest newspaper company when newspapers were everything in news. He actually built the second biggest newspaper company by figuring out how to use new technology. Other people were being destroyed by it, and he figured out that because of improvements in transportation, improvements in printing, but mainly improvements in something fantastic and new at the beginning of the 20th century called the telephone, he could actually create a newspaper company that he could run from one place but ultimately in 26 cities, actually in his brother’s lifetime in 26 cities.


The point is that he knew, he figured out, how to use this new technology in a way to expand his business from one single newspaper in Akron, Ohio, and to be able to ultimately run a newspaper company out of Miami, Florida, that included Philadelphia and San Jose and Wichita and Biloxi and Duluth and St. Paul, Detroit, Michigan, and be able to do it all from here because of the telephone. That would’ve been unthinkable when that technology was first introduced or when Jack Knight first started to run the Akron Beacon-Journal.

And so I think one of the things that we try to do at Knight Foundation is, to be honest, we’re not responsible for figuring out how to keep these jobs. We’re not responsible for delivering a 25 or 20 or even 15 percent margin to investors. We’re trying to figure out, “How do you use that new technology?” Let’s experiment with different ways of delivering news and information because, in the end, we still do all live in geographically-defined communities. We still have environmental policy, education, who fixes the potholes are all ultimately decided by people we elect by geographically-defined communities, and either we change the construct of our governing structure, or we have to figure out a way of getting the people who are making those election choices better information, and it has to be electronic. It has to be digital.

ANDELMAN: As you said that, I’m thinking about how things have changed on one level. I think Ed Koch of New York City used to be known as “Mayor Pothole.”

IBARGUEN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Right? And now we’ve got Mayor Bloomberg who is trying to affect national policy from his mayor’s seat. It’s a very different kind of world even at that level.

IBARGUEN: It really is. And Mayor Koch was fantastic. I happened to live in New York at the time, and there wasn’t a pothole that he couldn’t pay attention to. There wasn’t a ribbon-cutting. And Bloomberg has a different appreciation. Given his background and given what he built in his company, the Bloomberg Business Systems that he built that were an early and phenomenal user of digital technology to deliver business information.

There is another aspect, by the way, of the current newspaper problem, and maybe it’s also true of broadcast television, I’m not sure, and it’s the nature of the ownership. When newspapers were owned, up until the 1960s, there wasn’t any newspaper company that was a publicly held company. They were all family-owned or individually owned, and it didn’t matter whether it was the Meyers and the Grahams who owned the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers who owned The New York Times or the Chandlers in Los Angeles, Knight-Ridder, etc. In the mid-‘60s, the companies started to go public. There were great benefits to going public. You could raise a lot of money, you could invest a lot in the business, and it was a terrific growing concern.

But as ownership started to shift from the families to people who were interested in newspapers to institutional investors, the demand on newspapers, and at the same time, there was new technology coming along, not just radio then television, which were already there, but with the web and with cable, that really began cutting into the advertising base of the newspaper model. There was this sort of perfect storm of web and cable cutting into the advertising base at the same time that the investors in newspapers became more and more institutional investors. And institutional investors not only don’t, but cannot care about the basic function of the newspaper - that is the delivery of news and information to a community.

Jack Knight cared, and, in fact, when he went to Wall Street, there’s a very famous speech that he gave the only time that he went to talk to analysts, and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t like the way I run Knight Newspapers then I suggest you buy another newspaper company’s stock because I’m not gonna change. I’m running this in the way that I think a newspaper should be run.” And that was a luxury that I think his successors didn’t have when a fella named Sherman a couple years ago decided that Knight-Ridder at, whatever it was, a 20 percent margin, wasn’t making enough money and forced the sale of the company. I’m reminded of that because I saw a note in the paper this morning that said that Mr. Sherman is now 100 percent out of newspapers, zero. He used to own some part of Belo. He used to own some part of The New York Times. He used to own a big chunk of McClatchy, which is a company that bought Knight-Ridder, and now he owns nothing.

It’s a different kind of commitment. A newspaper is not going to leave the town. An institutional investor will invest in the newspaper in the same way it might invest in a shoe company, it might invest in a rug company, it doesn’t matter. It’s just simply another type of investment, and they’ll do it for a period of time, and then they’ll either stay in because they continue making money or get out without any sentimentality. A news organization, whether it’s television or cable or even and certainly newspapers, cannot…The Miami Herald cannot leave Miami. And so there’s that institutional part that seems to me to be incompatible with institutional investors. And I think that’s a really big problem for, I believe, for all of the publicly held newspaper companies.


ANDELMAN: There seemed to be a time, and again, I go back 20 to 25 years when it almost seemed like a good idea to have people with good business sense to come into the newspaper business and apply some fundamentals to the operation. The problem is, I think, that the business has been changed in the last 10 years by technology and other things. It takes more than just business sense to make a newspaper work.

IBARGUEN: I think it’s a combination of problems as I indicated a minute ago. I think there is new technology that is absolutely disruptive – that is cable to television and Internet to both television and certainly to newspapers. So there’s disruptive new technology, and by the way, that’s not a negative. That’s simply a fact. It disrupts the old model in a major way, and so the people who are going to win are the ones who figure out how to deliver what the community needs on the new platforms. I firmly believe that’s what Jack Knight did in his day in the beginning of the 20th century, and I believe that’s what we’re searching for now.

But there’s another factor, which is that the institutional investor is looking for a return. The institutional investor, that is the Legg Masons of this world, don’t really care whether Philadelphia is informed, whether Tallahassee is informed, whether St. Petersburg is informed. They care whether you return the amount of money that they planned to have you return. And so if you returned 14 percent, and they were planning 13, then that’s great. And with newspapers, they came to expect somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of money when you have your core business, the business side, the core business attacked and under great pressure as in the case of national advertising and with the web coming on so strong on classified advertising for jobs and that sort of thing. Think about it. If you go buy a car, it’s just too easy to look up on the web virtually every model that you can think about. The last three cars I bought I basically shopped for online and sort of gone for the test drive, but I really haven’t gone to do much other comparison.

Click Here to Keep Reading!

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Technorati Tags:
Alberto Ibargüen, Chicago Tribune, Jack Knight, Jim Knight, journalism, Karen Dunlap, Knight Commission, Knight Foundation, Knight News Challenge, Knight-Ridder, Miami Herald, Newsu.org, Poynter Institute, Sam Zell, Tribune Company, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, blogging, podcasting, future of newspapers, streaming media, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Rupert Murdoch, Boston Globe, St. Petersburg Times, Tribune Foundation, Ed Koch, Mayor Pothole, Katherine Graham, Sulzbergers, Otis Chandler, McClatchy Newspapers, Legg Mason, new media