The Deal from Hell (11 page)

Over the coming decades in the newspaper business, though, the relationship between business and editorial would change. Many journalists pin the blame for the current decline of the newspaper business
on the decision to go public, when publishers began worrying as much about the first quarter as the First Amendment. Publishers and ad men blame the trouble on newsrooms in denial populated by journalists who resist needed change. But nothing is that simple. It is hard to isolate one reason or event for the cause of the decline of powerful institutions that had weathered the challenges of time and turmoil. When you dig into the problems and peel off the anger, blame, lies, manipulation, and malice, the shortcomings and mistakes to which all parties plead guilty, the misfortune now plaguing newspapers traces to the severing of that bond of trust forged in pressrooms where editor and publisher alike got ink on their fingers. The next generation of leadership in Tribune Company and, with a few exceptions, in most of the rest of the industry experienced little common toil. Instead, mistrust, finger-pointing, and suspicion came to characterize the relationship between editors struggling to protect their newspapers and managers striving for the bottom line. Many newspapers and newspaper men and women simply lost their way, including Cook, a man who once pointed to the
Tribune
's newsroom and declared, “if anyone can solve our problems, they are out there, because they are the best that we've got.”

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protect the public interest, but also to protect fat payrolls, excessive editorial budgets, inefficient operations, and outdated technology.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.

C
harlie 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.

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:

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:

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.