Personal History (109 page)

In the meantime, the
Trentonian
, a feisty morning tabloid owned by Ralph Ingersoll in partnership with Mark Goodson, was giving blue-collar Trenton what it enjoyed. It was a clever paper, produced inexpensively and inoffensively, with an emphasis on amusement. We started a Saturday-morning newspaper to try to go head to head with the
Trentonian
, which countered by starting a Sunday paper to compete directly with ours. We may not have been losing money, but we weren’t near the profit goals we’d set or been led to believe were possible.

This was our first newspaper acquisition after the
Post
, but it was layered away from me and continued to be mismanaged most of the time we had it. Because The Washington Post Company now had a much higher profile, particularly after Watergate, how badly we were doing in Trenton became a big deal. We were widely written up, and our troubles were highlighted. At one time, I made the foolish statement, which was how I felt, that it was our Vietnam: there seemed to be no solution and no way out. This was not our shining moment.

However, by now we were in a position to add to the company, and we kept looking for compatible properties throughout the communications industry. Among the businesses that we approached or that approached us
were
New York
magazine,
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly
, Random House, and Simon and Schuster, but the first three didn’t work out, and the two publishing houses were just too large to bite off, or so we thought. We also missed on the newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, and we declined to bid on the
Denver Post
.

An important deal that we did make was prompted by our concerns about having the number-one newspaper and number-one television station in Washington, and being viewed as a media monopoly at a time when the FCC was looking hard at situations of cross-ownership. The Supreme Court was soon going to be deciding a case relevant to this issue—whether a company that owned a newspaper could also own a television station in the same town or market. Companies in these situations were worried about the outcome.

Our communications lawyers advised me to consider trading WTOP for a similar-sized station elsewhere that was also facing a cross-ownership situation. They were concerned that The Washington Post Company had too much dominance in Washington, D.C., right under the eyes of Congress, and that a decision against cross-ownership would come at a moment when we were in the midst of a license renewal and therefore not in a position to try for a station swap at that time.

Warren and I made the rounds of all the possible comparable stations: in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit. Only Peter Clark, head of the Detroit News Company, which had both a newspaper and a television station in a depressed area, was interested in talking. Detroit was nearly the same size market as Washington; at the time we were the eighth-largest broadcast market in the country, and Detroit was the seventh. The major difference was that our market was growing and theirs was stagnant. However, in some ways Detroit was a better television town than a newspaper town, so there was some hope of ending up in a profitable situation.

The decision of whether to trade WTOP for WWJ in Detroit (later renamed WDIV) was mine, and I was enough worried about the political climate and the weakness of our newspaper competition in Washington that I decided in favor of it. Warren and I together initially negotiated with Peter in Detroit. He wanted $6 million cash plus WTOP, because his station was bigger and more profitable than ours. We said that was too much. Peter came to see me in Washington, and I asked Warren to be there, but he said I could and should do it on my own, and we finally settled for $2 million. The deal was done—the first time I had negotiated by myself.

But still I was not very happy. We were giving up our oldest station—one with connections back to Phil and my father, one which I knew and loved, and which we’d built up to number one in the market—for Detroit, a strange town, unlike any I had known. When the actual changeover
came, people at WTOP were so devoted to Jim Snyder, our news director who was going to Detroit for us, that the anchors burst into tears when they signed off for the last time under our ownership.

The situation in Detroit was worse than my worst fears. We had traded a top-flight station in a dynamic market for a mediocre station in a market that was mired in a recession. On top of that, the station was an NBC affiliate, and NBC at that time was a network in trouble. We had our usual new-in-the-market problems: we wanted to run a better station, but resistance to change was endemic, and Detroiters were used to having their news delivered in a certain way, no matter how bad it may have been. Again, as in Trenton, we were painted as the out-of-towners. Any time we made a mistake or tried something new, critics at the other stations or at the newspapers leapt on us. It was so bad that Jim Snyder had a serious heart attack and had to leave. I suffered acutely at having decided to make the trade, particularly after the Supreme Court handed down its decision, grandfathering those companies who already had stations in cross-ownership towns. Little by little, the Detroit station improved and became very successful, but that didn’t happen before I had spent an inordinate amount of time blaming myself.

As part of the larger plan to acquire several smaller newspapers which never materialized, in 1978 we also bought the
Everett Herald
, a small paper located in a city north of Seattle, Washington. As with the
Trenton Times
, the
Herald
was acquired after poor appraisal. We paid a monopoly price for a paper that was in a somewhat competitive situation with Seattle and then proceeded not to run it well until recently, when it has been vastly improved. We also participated with Dow Jones in a start-up newsprint mill at Bear Island in Virginia.

A little later, under
Newsweek
’s aegis and at its urging, we made another start-up—a monthly sports magazine called
Inside Sports
. This was spearheaded by Peter Derow and the business side of
Newsweek
. Again, we conceived it poorly, tested it poorly, and ran it poorly, despite a clever editor, John Walsh. It, too, lost larger amounts of money than we expected and drained talent, energy, and time from
Newsweek
itself.

I
MPORTANT CHANGES WERE
taking place at the
Star
, which in the short run created some worry at the
Post
and in the longer run caused us even more concern before the end came, when the
Star
finally folded. Joe Allbritton had worked hard to turn around his staid and failing newspaper. When he first came to town, he had put in as editor Jim Bellows, a great talent who didn’t try to compete with us where we were strong but went under, around, and beside us. The paper became livelier, more interesting, and scrappier. Jim started a gossip column called “The Ear,” which specialized in tweaking the
Post
, which the
Star
referred to as the “O.P.”—or
the Other Paper. The most intimate details of the lives of many of us at the
Post
became grist for the mill of “The Ear.” In particular, it was savage about Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, referring to them as the “Fun Couple” and reporting on their every activity, no doubt with some help from reliable sources in our own city room. We all came in for attention, some of it accurate, some of it half accurate, some entirely fictitious.

But despite the good things that were happening, the
Star
was in a real decline, which, of course, had started long before Allbritton entered the picture. There is no question that its longtime dominance and success had bred self-satisfaction and lack of drive; it never seemed to occur to the ownership that the world could change.

Even so, the extended
Star
family wasn’t the main reason why we started to gain and the
Star
started to decline. A societal change in the country strengthened morning newspapers, while at the same time bringing hard times to the traditionally strong afternoon and evening papers. Principally, the growth of television network news, the flight to the suburbs from the inner cities, and urban problems affecting late-day home deliveries all weakened afternoon dailies. Possibly most important of all was the economy. As prices rose, particularly for labor and newsprint, newspapers raised rates, forcing advertisers to choose between papers—not divide their advertising, as many had previously done. If a newspaper rose to a certain dominance, there was often a snowball effect: advertisers realized that more people could be reached through the larger newspaper, so in an effort to cut costs they eliminated the weaker one. Once the momentum got going, there was not much that could be done. In some ways, this is what happened to the
Star
, exacerbated by the lack of attention to the competition. For far too long, no one at the
Star
had taken the
Post
seriously. But our advantage was not yet overwhelming. And I had learned, as had my father and Phil before me, what it feels like to be fighting for your life. We knew how far we’d go for a line of advertising or a new subscriber. Don and I still bear the scars. Young as he was, Don, too, understood that nothing stands still, that success can bring with it the roots of its own downfall.

In March 1977, Allbritton reached an agreement to trade or sell his Washington, D.C., radio station, which, according to the
Star
’s monthly publication for its employees, would “provide Star Communications with a guaranteed cash flow over the next 20 years.” Indeed, only a month later Allbritton announced the first profitable quarter at the
Star
since several years before he took over. I wrote congratulating him, and he responded that he knew one swallow didn’t make a spring, but that at last he saw light at the end of the tunnel, which he also realized might be a mirage.

The
Star
was a much-improved product, and Allbritton’s brilliant moves in selling his radio and smaller television stations put him in a far
stronger financial position. I was worried, but not as much as when, in early February 1978, Time Inc. announced that it was buying the
Star
. (Allbritton was keeping the valuable television station.) Now we were faced with the powerful, rich, professional, savvy Time Inc., which we saw as an even greater threat than the Texas millionaire. Time’s people tried new ideas, invested vast sums, and used
Time
magazine’s foreign correspondents to run foreign news in the
Star
. And they spent even more money than Allbritton had on promotion. The theme “Today’s News Today” began to appear on billboards everywhere. On radio and television the message about the new
Star
was delivered by “tough-talking ‘private ears’’ Sam and Janet Evening, radio characters who “snoop[ed] around Washington dredging up scoops” all to the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening.”
The Christian Science Monitor
ran an article about the increased competition between the
Post
and the
Star
headed “Star Wars Come to Washington.”

One of the first things the new editor of the
Star
did under the Time Inc. regime was to exhume a five-part profile of me by Lynn Rosellini that initially had been suggested by Joe Allbritton himself as a kind of hands-off look at me. In the end, he had ordered it killed because he thought it was so negative. Time Inc.’s people at the
Star
resurrected it, promoting it to the skies and even running the first two parts of the series on the front page. I’m not exactly objective about the series and have never reread it, but my memory is vivid that I was portrayed as a sort of Jekyll-Hyde. Not that some of what Rosellini said wasn’t true, but I was pictured so negatively that I feared no one would ever work for us again.

I got a lot of sympathetic mail, and the
Star
ran a highly supportive letter from Barry Goldwater, which I found all the more moving for his not being close to me. Goldwater wrote:

W
ITH
T
IME
I
NC.’S
arrival in town, it’s a wonder that I had the time or inclination for anything else in my life, but several activities that were a mix of public and private provided me with both a reprieve from business
concerns and a measure of fun and personal satisfaction. Bob McNamara, then president of the World Bank, had committed that institution to trying to help the nations of the so-called Third World. Northern countries were distressed by the radical rhetoric of the countries of the South and their irrational demands for billions of dollars in aid, and the countries of the South were angered at what they viewed as the insensitivity and heartlessness of the North. Bob’s idea was to ask a group to look at these problems as individuals rather than as representatives of their countries, and he had tapped Willy Brandt, former chancellor of West Germany, to lead it; the group came to be known as the Brandt Commission.

Bob argued that it would be good for me to join, because it would expose me to an aspect of the world about which I knew little; because I would bring a sense of what was politically viable within the United States; and because it would be good for the
Post
and
Newsweek
to become more aware of these issues. Although I was reluctant to break our rule about not getting involved in organizations that took stands on issues, I decided there were times for exceptions to rules, and this was one. I accepted.