The Press: New Boss for the Chronicle

When the San Francisco Chronicle’s President and Publisher George Cameron died a fortnight ago, there was little doubt about who would be his successor. For the past three years, Cameron’s nephew, Assistant Publisher Charles de Young Thieriot, 40, has been virtually running the Chronicle. Last week, as San Franciscans expected, the Chronicle’s board of directors named Thieriot president, publisher and editor.

He took over a politically potent paper that has often teamed up with the Oakland Tribune of Joseph R. Knowland, Senator Knowland’s father, and Norman Chandler’s Los Angeles Times to pick and back the winning candidates in California politics. But financially, the Chronicle has long been ailing.

One way or another, chunky Charley Thieriot has been trying to get the Chronicle firmly in the black. Soon after he became assistant publisher three years ago, 37 staffers were given notice, and Editor Paul Smith (now boss of Collier’s) quit in protest. Last year Managing Editor Larry Fanning resigned, according to city-room gossip, because of Thieriot’s determination to pinch more pennies out of the news budget.

Thieriot, who will eventually fall heir to one-sixth of the Chronicle’s stock, is a grandson of the Chronicle’s cofounder, Mike de Young. He grew up in San Francisco, graduated from Princeton (’36) and went to the Chronicle as a copy boy. He spent four years as reporter and rewrite man, then moved over to the business side, sold ads, ran circulation and negotiated labor contracts. After a wartime stint in the Navy, where he was a lieutenant commander, he came back as assistant business manager of the Chronicle. He opened and managed the paper’s radio station on the side, and when television reached the West Coast, he ran the Chronicle’s TV station. He quickly turned it into a moneymaker with profits of more than $1,000,000 a year.

To boost Chronicle circulation, Thieriot has spent lavishly for such stunts as “treasure hunts” and “mystery face” contests. But on news-gathering expenses he has kept a tight hold. For example, when the worst forest fires in 30 years broke out in California this fall, Chronicle staffers covered the story by telephone for the first three days. Finally Thieriot okayed the expense of sending one reporter-photographer team 200-odd miles to the Sequoia National Park, but by then the fire was almost out. While he gives editors a free hand at assigning stories, Thieriot makes the decision “if we are going to rent an airplane, or something of that nature.” Though such penny-pinching is hard on staff morale, Thieriot believes that it is paying off. He claims that Chronicle circulation is above 170,000 (v. 155,295 three years ago), and that the paper has moved close to the black. Says Publisher Thieriot: “I think the paper will make money this year.”