The Press: The Chain Scripps Forged

Viewed from almost any angle, the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain appears to make little economic or editorial sense.

Among its 18 dailies, dire poverty mingles with impressive wealth: the Cleveland Press expects to show a $2,000,000 profit this year, while in Columbus, just 140 miles away, the anemic Citizen-Journal must ration pencils to reporters. The chain has not one headquarters but three: in Washington. New York and Cincinnati. It speaks with a single voice from Washington on national and international matters, but encourages diversity on the local level. And while the typical newspaper chain strives to establish monopolies, Scripps-Howard tries to avoid them. In Memphis, the only city where a Scripps-Howard monopoly exists, the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar have quarreled hotly for 25 years—with full management approval.

Despite all this—and to an extent because of it—Scripps-Howard is the most viable and most successful newspaper chain in the U.S. It has endured for 84 years, longer than any other group, including the venerable Hearstpapers (age: 75). Unlike Hearst, which loses money on newspapering despite a circulation larger than Scripps-Howard’s 3,074,150. Scripps-Howard has consistently made money from birth. This year, on gross revenues of $200 million—which includes income from two feature syndicates, seven profitable broadcasting stations (four TV and three radio) and United Press International wire service—it will clear a thumping after-taxes profit of $10 million to $12 million. Whatever the reasons, the Scripps-Howard system indisputably works.

Carefully Groomed. One good reason why it works is that there is little meddling from the top. An abiding Scripps-Howard conviction, first enunciated by the late Edward Wyllis Scripps. who founded the chain, is that local editors know best how to run local newspapers. Scripps-Howard editors are carefully groomed—their average period of service is 33 years—and then are delegated considerable power, right down to screening the ads in their newspapers.

Even the national and international editorial line projected by management is charted under consultation with the editors. Policy is framed at an annual meeting of officers and editors, and the process is democratic, at least in form. “We reach decisions by common consent.” says Walker Stone. Scripps-Howard’s editor in chief. Based on this common con sent, a group composed of Stone and four editorial writers daily distributes editorials throughout the empire. Editors are expected to run them, and usually do, but no compulsion is involved. Fortnight ago. in segregationist Birmingham, Ala., the Scripps-Howard Post-Herald rejected an angry editorial that compared Mississippi’s rioting white supremacists to Nazis. Editor in Chief Stone was not surprised. Said he: “The editors have to modify their approach to suit their audiences.”

Military Mustache. In the same laissez-faire spirit. Jack R. Howard, 52. president and general editorial manager of Scripps-Howard newspapers. presides over the editorial show from the chain’s New York headquarters. After a thorough apprenticeship on half a dozen Scripps-Howard papers. Jack Howard reached his present eminence by right of royal succession: he is the only son of Roy W. Howard, the late E. W. Scripps’s longtime partner, who is still active at 79 as Scripps-Howard’s executive committee chairman. But about the only regal touches that Jack Howard permits himself are a military mustache (like his father’s) and a taste for resplendent dress (noisy suits, shrieking ties and shirts). He rules lightly, exercising his control largely by critiquing the editors’ monthly reports and by visiting each paper once or twice a year.

Nor do Scripps’s grandsons, who inherited his empire and vote 80% of Scripps-Howard stock, trespass on editorial prerogative. In fact, they are scarcely interested. From the chain’s third head quarters in Cincinnati. Grandson Charles W. Scripps. 42, board chairman of the controlling E. W. Scripps Co., is concerned mainly with implementing a directive handed down by his grandfather: “Never do business except at a profit.” Says Charles Scripps: “We’re constantly watching the profit picture. The minute you let up, the profits go down.”

Flourish or Flounder. The calculated result of such hands-off supervision is a press confederacy whose members take strength from association but are permitted to flourish or flounder almost entirely on their own. Scripps-Howard papers do both, in a pattern as diversified as the U.S. press at large. Items: > Perennially third in a field of three papers, the tabloid Washington Daily News not only returns a tidy profit but has taught its bigger competitors a journalistic trick or two. Shrewdly leaving politics to the Post (Democratically inclined) and the Star (Republican), bulky, freckled Editor John O’Rourke beams his paper at the capital’s sizable Negro population and the army of Government civil service workers, reaching them with some of the sprightliest headlines and the best all-round news play in the capital. The News’s superior Latin American coverage —a personal interest of Editor O’Rourke’s —has prompted the Post and the Star to follow suit.

>Also last in a field of three, the Houston Press, by contrast, is seriously ill. Down to 20-page issues and a local reportorial staff of eleven (against the Chronicle’s 71 and the Post’s 28), the Press has lost touch with its community. Sample banner headline: GARRY MOORE SUED FOR $40,000. Once known as the only fighting newspaper in Houston, the Press these days shows less stomach for a scrap. >In El Paso, on the Rio Grande, the Herald-Post is the prosperous and aggressive reflection of Editor Ed Pooley. 64, who has spent 30 years fighting everything from pigeons to cops on the make. Pooley has steadfastly championed the cause of “Juan Smith,” his symbol for the city’s Mexican-Americans, helped elect El Paso’s first Mexican-American mayor in 1957.

> In Memphis, the Commercial Appeal and Press-Scimitar share the same quarters and the same mechanical department,* but remain bitter and irreconcilable editorial rivals. The Press-Scimitar, more liberal than the Appeal, has sided with Democrat Estes Kefauver since his first U.S. Senate race in 1948; the Appeal waited until 1954 to endorse Kefauver, then changed its mind and opposed him two years ago. The Appeal does not lack for courage. Circulating in an area preponderantly segregationist, it nevertheless printed an editorial of its own on the Mississippi riots that was fully as forthright as the chain editorial spun out of Washington.

>In Cincinnati, the two Scripps-Howard papers are so independent that the chain does not consider Cincinnati a true monopoly, although it owns the only two dailies in town. The morning Enquirer has been a chain possession since 1956, but Publisher Roger Ferger does not go to the annual meetings (he is not invited) and does not receive the Washington-written editorials (he would not run them). Nor does the Scripps-Howard lighthouse beam from the Enquirer’s masthead. The Enquirer endorsed Ohio Republican William O’Neill for Governor in 1958, the Post & Times-Star supported Democrat Mike Di Salle. > To an even greater degree than the Cincinnati Post, the Cleveland Press picks local candidates without regard to their political hue. After supporting Di Salle in 1958, this year, disenchanted with his performance, it came out for Republican James R. Rhodes. One of the chain’s most profitable papers, the Press is thoroughly embedded in the community, thanks to the direction of peppy, longtime (34 years) Editor Louis B. Seltzer, 65, who has won the title of “Mr. Cleveland.” Seltzer pays close attention to Cleveland’s minorities, has made his paper’s endorsement so valuable that it is often tantamount to election. The Press helped boost Frank Lausche from municipal judge to Cleveland mayor to Ohio Governor to U.S. Senator—a triple assist that Lausche himself acknowledges—and also helped elect present Health. Education and Welfare Commissioner Anthony Celebrezze to the Cleveland mayor’s chair. >-Scripps-Howard’s biggest newspaper, New York’s World-Telegram and Sun, is a pale and lackluster product of three mergers that fails to give the chain an effective New York voice. Running in an afternoon field of second-rate competition, the World-Telegram features such Page One pap as a series of blurbs about the paper’s rejiggering of its comic page (“We want to know what you think”). From the circulation ground lost by Manhattan’s three evening papers after going to a dime in 1957, the World-Telegram has made the poorest recovery. Present circulation: 460,883, some 100,000 below the 1957 figure.

However handsomely the Scripps-Howard chain as a whole meets its found er’s injunction to show a profit, it frequently falls short of what he would have liked it to be. Its canned editorials not only relieve the editors of reaching their own conclusions about national and inter national affairs, but also often fall on deaf or mystified ears. “They write editorials about national stories that haven’t even appeared in the paper,” laments a housewife from Albuquerque, where the chain operates the evening Tribune. Because many Scripps-Howard papers use only the chain-owned U.P.I, wire service, they are often scooped by other newspapers with full wire coverage.

Now and then, some chain member still flashes signs of the old crusading fire, historically a hallmark of Scripps-Howard papers. Two Scripps-Howard Washington reporters dug up some of the first pay dirt in the Billie Sol Estes scandal. The Wash ington Daily News has crusaded loudly against expensive junkets and payroll padding by U.S. Congressmen. On the editorial side, Scripps-Howard’s Washington-based editorialists have come out for sanity in the federal budget, against unilateral tax cuts, against wasting troops in Laos (“We cannot save a far-off country which doesn’t care whether it is saved or not”), for holding the line in Berlin and, less expectedly, for John F. Kennedy’s cautious approach to Cuba.

In the days before newsmagazines and TV began reporting and interpreting the news to the whole country, Scripps-Howard spent more of their time and space crusading and explaining national issues to their readers. Today they have followed the general newspaper trend and become more local, immersing themselves in parochial crusading that ranges from the admirable to the ridiculous.

At Least Elastic. As if conscious of the pitfalls of comfortable old age, Scripps-Howard has in recent months chopped some of its most seasoned timber. Patriarchal Roy Howard has gradually stripped himself of all of his titles but chairman of the executive committee, and several aging Scripps-Howard editors have been replaced. Morale and pay are both often low on Scripps-Howard newspapers, many of which are understaffed and penny-pinched. But enthusiasm still has room to grow in the nurturing climate of local autonomy, and management now makes a point of trying to attract younger men.

It is unlikely that such injections of relatively young blood will materially change an operation that has worked well since E. W. Scripps established the Penny Press (later the Cleveland Press) on a borrowed $10,000 in 1878. Good and bad, fat and lean, solvent and insolvent, the Scripps-Howard newspapers are at the very least elastic. Unencumbered by the kind of tyrannous direction with which the late William Randolph Hearst suffocated initiative in his press empire, they remain supple enough to move with the times. And the times have undoubtedly changed vastly since the days of E. W. Scripps. “Newspapers, I like to think,” says Roy Howard, “are the common denominator of public thinking. In the old days, newspapers thundered at their readers. Now they are down among them.”

* An arrangement, born of economic necessity, that Scripps-Howard not only endorses but invented. The first U.S. daily to operate jointly with the opposition was the Albuquerque Tribune, a Scripps-Howard paper. Eight of the chain’s 18 papers now operate jointly, either with sister or competitive papers.