No American newspaper but the New York Times can match the Chicago Tribune in richness of tradition or worldwide fame. Its reporters were among the first ever accredited to cover the Congress of the United States. Its founder, Joseph Medill, called the meeting that resulted in the formation of the Republican Party. Medill’s grandson, Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, had been dead for 17 years by the time I was offered a job as the Tribune’s national political writer, but in newspaper lore the publisher still loomed as large as the great Gothic tower he had built on the highest point on Michigan Avenue.
Although the modern newspaper war between Tribune and Field lacked the energy and imagination of those fought by the old press lords, it retained one of their important characteristics–each company was privately held and answerable for its performance to no one but family stockholders. In this regard Chicago was fast becoming an anachronism. But both the Field heirs, brothers Marshall III and Ted, were far less dedicated to their grandfather’s public service mission of keeping the Colonel’s paper honest. Increasingly, they had become preoccupied with their own pursuits in real estate and moviemaking.
“If there is anything in this world I am an expert on,” Brumback told me during an argument over newsprint usage in 1977, “it is columns of numbers. I’ve been looking at them all my life.” The discussion, over how much newsprint should be devoted to columns of election vote results, was a harbinger of things to come. Basically, newspapering is a simple business. About three-fourths of all costs can be broadly characterized as either newsprint or labor. Any pursuit of cost reduction leads very quickly to the size of the newspaper or the size of the staff. Over the next 13 years, Brumback’s dogged pursuit of cost reduction became legendary among Tribune Company employees, typifying a new style of newspaper management that would by 1990 be running the entire industry.
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During the next four years, Brumback and I increased the operating margins of the Orlando Sentinel from the mid-teens–then average for the industry–to the low twenties. That was then among the industry’s best. Soon the Sentinel was contributing nearly as much money to the corporate bottom line as the Tribune, which was three and a half times its size. Furthermore, the newspaper’s journalistic reputation had done an about-face in less than three years. One national newsweekly called us the most improved newspaper in the country, “most certainly in the top 15.” Attracting the most interest was our pioneering of zoned local news and advertising, which targeted four suburban counties around Orlando. Then again, being successful with a monopoly newspaper in the mistake-proof, union-free environment of Orlando, Florida, did not require genius.
When we set our budget in Orlando, we worked from the assumption that we would have to surpass the previous year’s profit by at least 15 percent, and by 20 or 25 percent if possible. This meant that no editorial improvement could be paid for without new advertising revenue. In short order I resorted to the tactic of lumping a financially lucrative advertising project with a costly editorial one, letting the profits of one underwrite the other.
“I know,” he replied. “The place is a mess. Why don’t you come up and help me fix it?”
But not long after I assumed McCrohon’s seat at the planning group table, it became apparent to me that my predecessor had been fired for nothing. Wherever there was a circulation gain by the Sun-Times in a suburb, there was a corresponding Tribune gain in an adjacent suburb farther out. The Sun-Times penetration in Quintile Two had increased only because Sun-Times readers in Quintile Three city neighborhoods were moving westward and taking their newspaper habit with them. The corresponding movement among Tribune readers was being reflected in higher incomes among Quintile Ones who were even farther west and were adding circulation numbers in areas where the Sun-Times had no home delivery distribution. The Sun-Times’s “invasion of the suburbs” died that day on the planning group table, too late to save McCrohon’s job.
