GOODBYE, MR. SCRIPPS

...San Juan is a special case, Puerto Rico's only English-language daily...

...The editors of The News didn't want to be left behind...

...UPI did invest in new technology, and this was surely necessary, but without plenty of skilled journalists beating the bushes for stories, the investment went to waste...

...Scripps, compiled by Charles R. McCabe from Old Man Scripps's unpublished essays...

...Editorial departments are kept separate and presumably in competition, usually on different floors in the same building...

...It is only when they are far advanced and have a more or less considerable capital stake that mind-corrupting influences begin their work...

...The trend was the "agency deal," in which one corporation is formed to publish both a morning and an evening paper and the mechanical and business departments of competing papers are merged...

...Such third-generation capitulation to the boys who carry the hod is not unknown in other trust-ridden American business enterprises...

...a third departed for a job with The Miami Herald, which soon sent him overseas again...

...The owners in New York felt it was a risky proposition...

...At the time of the UPI sale, 1,087 U.S...

...That was true in Old Man Scripps's day and still is...

...That seemed to happen to all the weaker Scripps papers...

...since 1975 it had registered $32 million in pre-tax losses...

...The arrangement also guarantees profits that can be inordinate...

...I'm sure the Scripps family was aware that a kind of journalistic Altzheimer's Disease was descending on what was left of their empire...

...Plain talk is eschewed...

...it's too hard to fight the combined power of two newspapers under one roof...

...He shouted: "You can't run that movie review, they took out an extra quarter-page ad...

...UPI reporters were scrappy and their writing was snappy, but UPI ran a big-time news service on a shoestring...

...In the same era, Scripps-Howard began or bought six television stations and expanded a small radio chain to six stations...

...I'd been put in charge of the newspaper's feature sections, and one day the Hearst ad manager came to my cubicle after the first edition hit the street...

...Old Man Scripps's scorn of plutocrats, including advertisers, was forgotten...

...As we talked about this death in his family, I saw tears in his eyes...

...It was evident from the paper's tone that the Hearst people were gaining the upper hand...

...He concluded: "Be diplomatic, but don't be too damned diplomatic...

...What's that...

...in Memphis, Scripps owns both the strong morning and feeble afternoon papers, published under the same roof...

...Its appearance in the Scripps organization has led some employees to the wry observation that the founder ought to be called 'Whirling Ed.' " Those are tough words and I'm not sure Ted Scripps, at least, deserves them...

...the plan to become an area-wide newspaper never materialized...

...Scripps-Howard never did anything about this in San Francisco, except run a lot of foolish giveaways, until August 1959, when the staff of The News was informed one weekend that its paper had been merged with its arch-rival, Hearst's afternoon Call Bulletin...

...In Washington, twenty years ago, a reporter who called a high Federal official, said he was from Scripps-Howard, and asked to speak to the boss would be put through...

...had nothing to do with the demise of The Cleveland Press, founded by Old Man Scripps in 1878 and the flagship of a chain of dailies that at one time or another had included forty-seven newspapers...

...McCabe, summing it up in 1951, wrote: "Since the death of the founder there has been a growing tendency on the part of his legatees to hand over control of the words they sell to 'those bright boys from off the streets.' Today an aggressive management makes policy along lines that would have horrified the founder—'their money does their thinking too.' This policy is ratified by a supine and largely indifferent ownership...

...For thirty-one of those years I carted around a book called Damned Old Crank,A Self-Portrait of E.W...

...So would the Anglos...

...At one time there was a Scripps plan to add a Sunday edition of The Cleveland Press, but it never got off the ground...

...In 1951 I marked a sentence on Page 146 in soft copy pencil and appended the words, "Remember always...

...They ensconced themselves at the Clift Hotel, ate and drank well, and told us locals how to run a newspaper that was rapidly losing momentum and money in a four-newspaper city surrounded by prospering suburban dailies...

...For years the Scripps managers whined about their six-day afternoons, but they never could bring themselves to gamble the kind of money it would take to add Sunday papers or to convert their afternoons to the morning field...

...The Scripps people were to be in charge of the editorial side, the Hearst people in charge of the business side...

...The movie review remained, but I was suspect among the Hearstlings from then on...

...But in the days when I was a kid reporter and kid copyreader at The San Francisco News, the Scripps-Howard chain was the nation's largest...

...One day, my managing editor told me, with some excitement, about a plan to expand our paper's coverage...

...I retired from the barnacle-ridden Scripps organization last February...

...More recently, a UPI Paris bureau chief quit to take a desk job with the International Herald-Tribune, which he told me "paid double what UPI was paying—literally...

...Most men fear to speak the truth, the bald, whole truth, to any man or community because they fear that the man or the community is not prepared to endure such frankness...

...Fortunately that suggestion died...

...Ohio taxpayers are supposed to come up with $3 million for the school...

...And it slipped from high-profile national influence to a kind of low-profile regionalism...

...Scripps Co., which controlled the newspaper chain...

...And in a 1911 letter to the young editor who founded The Houston Press, Old Man Scripps wrote: "Young journalists and young journalistic institutions are naturally honest and fearless...

...I turned to Page 237 of Damned Old Crank and found Old Man Scripps's plain talk to youngsters who want to get into newspaper work: "First and foremost I want to tell you that a college is about the last place in the world where a man should go to learn about journalism...

...I think I knew it as far back as the mid-1960s, the night Scripps-Howard's Houston Press died...

...In 1981 I suggested to the current El Paso editor that he experiment with running some news and features in Spanish, since much of the El Paso population increase is Mexican...

...It integrated two newspaper syndicates, NEA and United Features, and plunged into cable TV...

...Midway between the UPI sale and the death of The Cleveland Press, there was a curious note: The Scripps-Howard Foundation, a tax-free philanthropy that bestows journalism awards and scholarships, announced a $1.5 million gift to Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, for a journalism program to be called the E.W...

...But he was a risk-taker and a rogue capitalist who scorned advertisers, politicians, and the rich...

...I suspect he also knew that UPI, the for-profit news service his grandfather had started in 1907 to buck the Associated Press monopoly, was heading for trouble...

...He was a capitalist who wanted his papers—he started thirty-two, bought fifteen—to show profits...

...He now freelances for newspapers and magazines...

...I was working for Scripps-Howard's national bureau in Washington then, and that evening I ran into Ted Scripps—E.W...

...Rereading his essays (he called them "disquisitions"), I had to think Old Man Scripps, who died in 1926, knew what would happen to his press empire...

...For example, the owner of a morning-Sunday paper will get 60 per cent, the six-day afternoon paper 40 per cent, no matter how well or poorly each paper does...

...It is rare indeed when the circumstances are such that a conscientious man can lose anything by fearless, frank speech and writing...

...VIEWS REV I E W S GOODBYE, MR SCRIPPS BY WILLIAM STEIF suppose I didn't have to wait for the sale of United Press International and the death of The Cleveland Press last June to know that Scripps-Howard was doomed as a major power in the American press...

...They joined the country club and Rotary, made friends with the local bankers and merchants, became wine connoisseurs, and forgot their roots...

...Its managers failed to see the need—or didn't want to spend the money—for reporting at the source...

...The News was a city-based six-day afternoon daily and the San Francisco Bay Area was booming, with people streaming north into Marin County, south into San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and across the Bay...

...It didn't work, and I discovered why soon enough...

...The sentence reads: "The press of this country is now, and always has been, so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economic, and social subjects which it is necessary that they shall have in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and chicanery of the ruling and employing class...

...UPI, too, fell victim to Scripps-Howard's failure to respond to changing editorial needs—and to myopic stinginess...

...At its death, The Press, with a circulation of 316,000, was losing $500,000 a month...

...A paternalistic management eases time-servers from one chore to another until they come up with great ideas like the E.W...

...The trick for editors in those towns is to stay alive, but not too alive...

...In those days, as much as now, the Scripps-Howard editorial writers were crowing about what Ronald Reagan calls "the magic of the marketplace...

...All are dead...

...The News-Call Bulletin appeared on the streets the following Monday with much hoopla and a circulation well over 200,000...

...In two cases, Pittsburgh and Knoxville, the Scripps papers, both afternoon-and-Sunday dailies, are dominant, with their six-day morning "rivals" living on the leavings...

...They were replaced by papers in such places as Stuart, Florida, and Fullerton, California, by dozens of free-circulation weeklies— shoppers—in California, Kentucky, and Florida, and by a chain of local business weeklies...

...1 stayed a long time—too long, probably—but I always thought there was the possibility of speaking "the bald, whole truth," and I tried to...

...Today when a reporter announces he's from Scripps-Howard, he's likely to be greeted with: "Scripps and Howard...

...Denver and San Juan are exceptions...

...The Polish press agency has agreed to buy UPI, on condition that the present management is retained...

...Even then, six-day afternoon newspapers had become a drug on the market...

...The corporate partners agree in advance on how profits will be split...

...That was a euphemism for cheap, and the paper showed it...

...In Cincinnati, Columbus, Birmingham, Evansville, Albuquerque, and El Paso the Scripps papers are permanent underdogs, with stunted circulations, limited staffs, and stingy budgets...

...There was nothing he could do about it, though he and his two brothers, the three grandsons of the original Edward Willis Scripps, were the owner-trustees of the E.W...

...Instead, they fired the editor and replaced him with an editor from Evans-ville, Indiana, whose first inspiration was to do a feature story about Chinese New Year in pidgin English, "the way we did it with the Chinese laundryman in Evansville...

...When Joe Cole added a Sunday paper to the sinking Press, it was too late...

...Old Man Scripps had warned about these "bright boys," saying they could be easily-dazzled...

...In the late 1970s, the gross of The Albuquerque Tribune one year was around $5 million, and its net around $2 million— while its managing editor was being paid not much more than $300 a week...

...I recall the young reporters in the Paris UPI bureau in the early 1970s: One quit because he couldn't get a $10-a-week raise— he went to free-lance in Iran, and eventually caught on with The Washington Post...

...On October 31, 1980, Scripps-Howard had sold the Cleveland paper for $1 million and promises of profits—if there ever were profits—to Joseph E. Cole, a millionaire who, it turned out, didn't have enough millions to keep The Press alive in recessionary Cleveland...

...Scripps Co...

...Keep your ear to the ground...

...a second left to return to New York and caught on with Newsweek...

...I think this is a mistake...

...In a city whose population is now more than 500,000, the El Paso Herald-Post's circulation hovers around 32,000—no more than it was a quarter-century ago, when the city was half its present size...

...UPI depended heavily on rewriting the local papers, whether in Paris or Pocatello...

...But they've probably got their money's worth— they paid an estimated $20 million—in new hardware, including a $10 million computer center in Dallas...

...It was a trend that started in Albuquerque, then moved on to El Paso and Evansville...

...Scripps School of Journalism...

...I went to work as a cub reporter on The San Francisco News on June 12,1946, fresh out of college and the Army, and invested almost thirty-six years in the Scripps enterprises...

...Today, monopoly is the name of the media game...

...Within the Scripps organization these days there is a kind of reverential quality that's institutionalized in its monthly house organ and in a "handbook" that is periodically updated...

...Whether UPI's buyers—a Moline, Illinois, publisher, two Nashville television executives, and a Chicago lawyer—can turn the wire service around is questionable...

...But they were...

...But it gave me a certain sense for the "bright boys from off the streets" the Scripps organization was putting in charge of its newspapers...

...In the 1970s, a top manager in the Scripps organization referred to his editor in El Paso as "the richest editor" in the chain because he ran his paper "very efficiently...

...they couldn't compete with the nightly television news, so advertisers shunned them...

...Old Man Scripps understood that's what journalism is supposed to be about...

...In addition to San Francisco, Houston, and Cleveland, it had dailies in New York, Washington, Indianapolis, and Fort Worth...

...I got my first whiff of Scripps-Howard's decline around 1950 in San Francisco...

...He continued: "Whenever there is a contest between the ruling classes, including not only employers but government officials, on one side, and the wage earners, the poor men, and even the moderately well-to-do men, on the other side, I have chosen to be the associate, friend, and fellow striver of the second party...

...I wish it well...

...Scripps-Howard today is left with fifteen dailies, of which only four are their cities' leading newspapers—in Pittsburgh, Memphis, Knoxville, and Denver...

...Old Man Scripps had warned about the 'bright boys' who joined the country club and Rotary It has become clearer and clearer in the last generation that Scripps was de-emphasizing the printed word and emphasizing the bottom line...

...It was quickly evident that Ted was depressed about The Houston Press closing...

...ing them at the beck and call of the businessmen who run newspapers...

...By the mid-1960s, I think, Ted already knew the Scripps-Howard Newspapers couldn't compete...

...This arrangement assures that any other possible competitor will be shut out...

...A second Paris bureau chief left to go to work for U. S. News and World Report...

...And the papers' owners couldn't or wouldn't risk the capital needed to add Sunday editions or to convert to the morning field...

...newspapers subscribed only to AP, 381 took only UPI, and 252 subscribed to both wire services...

...The big changes in the newspaper business came in the 1950s, when television began to supersede newspapers—or at least six-day afternoon papers—as a primary news source...

...It was a marvelous training ground, but the best UPIers departed...

...The alternative was to enter into quasi-monopoly arrangements, scrimping on the newspapers and shifting excess capital to such surefire profit-makers as television and radio...

...Today most of the major Scripps-Howard dailies take part in agency deals...

...UPI was also a distress sale...

...But most journalists know that editorial writers are reporters whose feet have given out, leavWilliam Steif retired earlier this year as a national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers...

...He suggested we have a drink at the Press Club bar and we had several...

...We had worked together on Scripps-Howard's old San Francisco News in the 1950s...

...In Washington last year, a small joke made the rounds of UPI staffers: "Have you heard...

...The incentive for editors to hold down costs is a slice of budgetary savings: An adroit financial manager can earn thousands of extra dollars yearly if he'll skimp on reporters and sub-editors...

...Ted was and is an old friend...

...A lot of visiting Scripps-Howard dignitaries rolled into San Francisco while I worked there...

...In order to succeed, strip yourself of all the vanities of your class and be not only able but glad to be one in the ranks of the vulgar masses...

...His wife spoke up, horrified: "The advertisers would hate that," she said...

...Technically, the E.W...

...Scripps School of Journalism...

...That's not out of line with Old Man Scripps's philosophy...

...Scripps II—at flie National Press Club...

...Keep your eyes continually on the future...