Word: gannett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like many newspaper owners who sell out to a chain, Robert McKinney decided to stay on and help run the place. But McKinney did not like what the Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper group (82 dailies with a combined circ. of 3.5 million), was doing to his Santa Fe New Mexican (circ. 17,960). So he sued to get it back, and last week he won. Federal District Judge Santiago Campos ordered Gannett to return the New Mexican after a six-member jury ruled that the chain had breached an employment contract McKinney signed when he sold...
...supremely self-confident air. Born and raised in South Dakota, he made a name for himself at the Miami Herald, a Knight (now Knight-Ridder) paper, where he rose from reporter to assistant managing editor in four years, and later at Knight's Detroit Free Press. Neuharth joined Gannett in 1963 and was president by 1970, leading some colleagues to snipe that his rise came a little too fast. "When Al wears a sharkskin suit," a friend once observed, "it's hard to tell where the shark stops and he begins...
Like Neuharth, Gannett papers are invariably well packaged, smartly designed and slickly promoted. In overall quality they run several furlongs behind Knight-Ridder but ahead of just about every other large chain. Neuharth argues that Gannett has never acquired a paper it did not improve. This is testimony partly to the sorry quality of medium-sized papers in the U.S. But it is also true that Gannett has expunged the rabid right-wing excesses from a few of its papers-notably those in Springfield, Mo., and Nashville -and dramatically upgraded other properties, like the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post. As even...
Beyond such generalized praise and the vague objections of chain haters, it is difficult to characterize Gannett journalism. The firm's home office in Rochester approves budgets, buys certain syndicated features and offers design and editorial assistance. Otherwise, Gannett editors are allowed wide latitude. Most would probably agree with Tom Callinan, managing editor of the Little Falls (Minn.) Daily Transcript (circ. 3,800), when he says: "I stay within my budget, put out a good product and they don't bother...
Critics find many Gannett papers parochial and uninspired, as wholesome as enriched bread but often just as bland. Even many Gannett hands are frustrated by the company's failure to produce one truly outstanding daily. A comparison is often made with Knight-Ridder, which purchased the struggling Philadelphia Inquirer in 1969 and spent millions righting it. The Inquirer, which last week won its sixth consecutive Pulitzer, now stands comfortably in the black and high in the esteem of U.S. journalists. For some of Gannett's employees, it will take more than last week's Pulitzer to make...