Word: gannett
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Each year visiting journalists observe council procedures and return home both awed and puzzled. "It ought not to work," says Vincent Jones, former executive editor and vice president of the Gannett newspapers, "but somehow it does...
...Gannett papers now serve state capitals as far apart as Hartford and Honolulu. Last year was the company's biggest ever for acquisitions: 17 dailies for a total of $130 million, mostly in Gannett stock. This year the group has already paid $14 million for the Nashville, Tenn., Banner (circ. 97,800), and next month plans to take over the El Paso Times (59,348) for an estimated $20 million. With Gannett stock selling at some 35 times earnings, stockholders at the corporation's annual meeting in Rochester last week authorized a doubling of outstanding shares...
Board Chairman Miller, now 65, is an energetic Missourian who came to the chain's Rochester headquarters in 1947 as executive assistant to Frank Gannett after an editorial career with Oklahoma papers and the Associated Press, where he rose from night filing editor in Columbus to Washington bureau chief in only ten years. Miller collects dailies for Gannett with the enthusiasm of a kid amassing marbles, and journalism may well remember him in newspaper terminology as the "Rochester Acquirer." Because he travels so much for both Gannett and the A.P. (which elected him its president in 1963 and chairman...
...seven papers on the letterhead, Miller promptly phoned Weil. "Look," he said, "I see that you're not in any states where we are, and we're not in any states where you are. Why not talk about a possible merger?" Only four months later, Gannett agreed to buy out Federated. Miller shuns the biggest cities, where purchase costs are high and prospects for circulation increases limited. His general policy is to seek dailies that are "dominant in a growth market." Recent acquisitions have been principally in Florida, middle-sized cities in the South and West...
Indefinite Expansion. The editorial benefits of common ownership can be considerable to individual papers. The Cocoa, Fla., Today (48,101) covers space shots with imagination and expertise for the whole chain, via the Gannett News Service. The Statesman in Boise has been filing with local insight for all papers on the recent Idaho mine disaster. The News Service circulates such group-wide features as an entertainment column from the San Bernardino Sun and a music column from the Times-Union. Small papers benefit from staff coverage by bigger ones and in turn serve as testing grounds for technical improvements that...