Word: upi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when Scripps sold UPI after 75 years, its president promised UPI faithful that the reporting stalwart would not be abandoned. The Scripps family said especially that selling to foreign owners would be a last resort, since UPI is an American news company. Reuters and Agence France Presse might sneak across the borders, but the Scrippses felt offshore ownership would compromised the company's excellence. Today a Saudi group, including the brother-in-law of King Fahd owns UPI. But how can anyone complain? It beats the embezzlers whose hard time still makes the old Brit grin...
...happened slowly but very surely. By 1980, UPI had been losing money for 25 straight years, and Scripps had had enough. The company went up for sale and, while on the market, lost its contract with the New York Daily News, which may well have been its lifeblood. UPI's contract with the also-struggling tabloid was good for $55,000 per month. In desperate denial, UPI offered to let the Daily News hang on to its service for free for months, hoping to win back the contract. Enter the Tennesseans...
Exit the Tennesseans. Soon came the embezzlers, and in 1991, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy protection. Four years later, UPI bigwigs received federal fraud and conspiracy indictments, accused of falsifying books and lease transactions. Soon the Saudi's plunked down $3.6 million and made the UPI headache their own. And along the way, the Teletype machines, the excitement, the reporters, and the copy were discarded in what seems like a vain effort to hold together the crumbling shells of an empty...
There is no lesson to learn from this story. Epic as it may be, at least for nostalgic reporters, it is largely a case of mismanagement. Changing taste for news can hardly be blamed, since the company had been hemorrhaging millions for decades. At most, the demise of UPI should simply remind us of the inevitable disintegration of all things...
...UPI as a human chapter in the telling of the human story is probably best. To remember the pinnacle of reporting--writing down words to describe the actions of men and women and the lives they live--is to tip one's hat to the pinnacle of civilization and politics in the twentieth century. And to discover the real life, or at least a single beat in the rhythmic pulse, of Washington...