Vol. 173: Ted Turner’s legacy

Or: Why I prefer the profit motive

Ted Turner, who died last week at 87, was a brash and often obnoxious entrepreneur whose saving grace was his audacity. You probably wouldn’t want him for a boss (his insults and screaming fits were legendary) or a partner (at one point he was $2 billion in debt) or a husband (he was divorced three times). Yet his ability to think outside the box changed our world.

In 1980, Turner revolutionized television news by creating Cable News Network, which presented news all day long in the outlandish belief that news occurs all day long and ought to be reported when it occurs. In its first two years, this novel concept lost up to $2 million a month. At first, CNN had fewer than 2 million viewers, compared with the three big networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— whose news broadcasts then collectively reached more than 50 million households. Today those network news operations are almost irrelevant in the shadow of CNN and its subsequent imitators, like Fox News, MS Now, CNBC, BBC, Newsmax, and NewsNation.

Then in 1985, Turner paid $1.5 billion for the MGM Studio’s library of 3,500 old and presumably worthless films that everybody had already seen (like Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane) as well as the Warner Brothers’ pre-1948 catalogue, which included Casablanca and all the Looney Tunes cartoons. Turner harbored the bizarre notion that new generations (not to mention old ones) might want to watch these films repeatedly, uncut and without commercial interruption. The result, nine years later, was another revolutionary cable TV concept: Turner Classic Movies, which attracted millions of new viewers to Turner’s cable TV network.

By contrast, the Lenfest Institute

I mention these flashes of brilliance because we live in an age when many otherwise sensible people believe the future of news and information lies not with driven visionaries like Ted Turner but with the sort of cautious, prudent folks you find in the not-for-profit sector.

Newspapers have been shellshocked ever since the late 1990s, when the Internet began delivering news instantly, conveniently, inexpensively, and even interactively, without sacrificing a single tree or wasting gas on a single delivery truck. In this brave new world, 2,900 American newspapers have vanished since 2005, and many of the survivors have been saved only by some sort of do-good civic foundation. The largest of these, the Philadelphia Inquirer (which changed hands six times between 2006 and 2016), survives today as the subsidiary of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, a well-intentioned not-for-profit corporation, dedicated in principle to supporting hard-hitting local investigative journalism.

Every six months or so, the Inquirer publishes an op-ed essay by Jim Friedlich, the Lenfest Institute’s CEO, extolling the virtues of this new model and beseeching governments and private citizens to help support it. He writes hopefully of “practical, bipartisan approaches,” including “smart public policy,” like a New Hampshire proposal for tax subsidies for small businesses that advertise in local news outlets. Or an Illinois state program that provides payroll tax credits to news organizations that employ local journalists. Or a Pennsylvania proposal to provide state grants and fellowships for local journalists.

The best that can be said about these ideas is that they may maintain the status quo until some creative hustler like Ted Turner figures out a better way to make money from good journalism. The worst that can be said about them is that they force journalists into partnerships with politicians when we should be their independent watchdogs.

In any case, precisely because they lack stockholders, not-for-profits like the Lenfest Institute lack the incentive to think entrepreneurially— which I would argue is the key to enterprising journalism. No one’s life’s savings are tied up in a foundation— and without that personal survival motive, the urge to innovate becomes less urgent.

Small-town revolution

In my own career, no fewer than five very different publications have demonstrated what a difference one gutsy entrepreneur can make.

My first boss, Hugh Ronald in Portland, Indiana (population 7,000), lacked any formal journalistic training, other than working on his college paper. But in the 1940s, when he was managing a local work-clothing factory, Hugh grew disturbed by the mediocre quality of Portland’s daily paper, the Commercial Review. In 1946, when he was 35, Hugh teamed up with a Portland banker to buy a small weekly paper elsewhere in the county. Three years later he converted it to a weekly county-wide pictorial magazine. For the next ten years, this rural county with less than 23,000 population enjoyed a phenomenon unknown even in many major cities: competition between local print media. Finally, in 1959, the owners of the Commercial Review capitulated and sold their paper to Hugh’s company.

Now Hugh implemented his astounding vision of a vibrant, independent small-town paper. Although dailies of this size typically employed a three-person news staff— an editor, sports editor, and women’s editor, none of whom held a college degree— Hugh’s Commercial Review had a five-person staff, including three college graduates. To attract professional journalists to Portland, Hugh offered above-average pay. (At a time when starting reporters in Chicago were making $65 a week, Hugh offered me $100 out of Penn in 1964.) Most papers of this size printed canned editorials, if indeed they had an editorial page at all; Hugh initiated a policy of daily signed editorials, written by the staff, often taking controversial positions on local and national issues. The paper’s slogan— “You can’t afford to miss a single issue”— was a constant reminder to readers and staff alike that our priority was our audience, not some lofty abstract principle.

Barney Kilgore’s Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889, was for its first half-century a pedestrian and often corrupt business rag. It was transformed beginning in the early 1940s by a driven visionary named Bernard Kilgore, who introduced the notion of humanizing articles about complicated subjects. Kilgore insisted that editors and reporters make room in news stories for anecdotes, narrative details, and portraits of individuals. Under his regime, reporters were granted the then-unheard-of luxury of working on stories for days— or, when necessary, even weeks or months— to provide the reader with an in-depth report.

Kilgore also prodded his reporters to address readers in language that was neither pedantic nor patronizing. “The next time I see the word upcoming in a story,” he declared in one famous memo, “I will be downcoming, and someone will be outgoing.” Moreso than any other American newspaper at the time I joined it (in 1968), the Wall Street Journal had assembled that rare combination of resources, expertise, sound instincts, writing talent, independent spirit, and professionalism that distinguishes a great newspaper from a merely competent one.

A movie or a lecture?

Philadelphia Magazine, similarly, was a bland Chamber of Commerce organ for more than half a century after its founding in 1908. It had no editorial budget and just 6,000 subscribers in 1961, when publisher Arthur Lipson died and ownership passed to his exuberantly childish son, D. Herbert Lipson. At this point, Herb Lipson liberated the magazine’s previously muzzled editor, Alan Halpern, and by the time I joined it in 1972 Philadelphia had evolved into a spunky, trend-setting magazine of 140,000 circulation whose writers brought style and wit to every subject, no matter how mundane. There was nothing like it anywhere in the country, including New York (Philadelphia Magazine subsequently provided the model for New York Magazine).

The difference between reading Philadelphia and other publications in those days was roughly the difference between attending a movie and a lecture. Instead of reporting the dry facts about urban prostitution or suburban burglaries, Philadelphia writers portrayed the night’s work of a fictitious “composite” prostitute and a “composite” burglar, based on real people they knew. They wrote not as objective journalists but as passionate humans sharing their excitement about their subjects.

This was the dawn of what came to be known as “the new journalism.” At that time, you bought Philadelphia Magazine not to read specific stories or writers, but for the general expectation that anything you found in any issue would surprise, delight, shock, or fascinate you. In this manner, Philadelphia Magazine introduced its readers to a broad range of weighty subjects— education, transportation, poverty, city planning— that wouldn’t otherwise have interested them.

(Philadelphia Magazine finally passed this year from the Lipson family into a not-for-profit. Are you surprised to learn that the current issue contains a long critique of Philadelphia Schools Superintendent Tony Watlington that reads, yes, like attending a lecture rather than a movie?)

The Welcomat’s eccentric boss

In the spring of 1981, I met Susan Levin Seiderman, a suburban housewife (as such women were then called) who had recently inherited control of the Center City Welcomat, a free weekly newspaper distributed in downtown Philadelphia. This “shopper”— so-called because people read it mostly for the ads— had been launched in 1971 by Susan’s father, Leon Levin, not out of any interest in Center City but to protect his weekly South Philadelphia Review from competition on its northern flank.

Throughout that decade, Susan had implored her father to upgrade the Welcomat into a more sophisticated vehicle, but her risk-averse dad had stubbornly refused. Now Leon Levin was gone. and Susan was eager to fulfill her vision— what she described to me as “the Village Voice in Philadelphia”— but uncertain how to go about it. Her logic was refreshingly selfish and direct: “If I have to read this paper,” she told me, “I want it to be interesting.”

Thus began a novel experiment. Susan and I converted the Welcomat into a free-wheeling and unique opinion forum. Instead of assigning stories, I asked readers to submit unsolicited essays and letters on subjects they cared about. I granted them total freedom to express themselves, no matter how offensive their thoughts. In effect, the Welcomat was a precursor of the Internet.

As the editor, I was often credited with this transformation, but it never would have happened without Susan’s willingness to risk capital, her courage to let me experiment and make mistakes, and her passion for free expression that enabled her to smile politely each week while her paper published opinions and language that made her cringe. Her combination of hardheaded managerial acumen and maternal concern enabled her to build a loyal and talented organization that maintained its family ambience even as it grew into a big moneymaker.

I often heard Susan described as eccentric— a description I would not dispute. She could be irascible, temperamental, unpredictable, and maddeningly illogical (much like Ted Turner). Her attention span was minimal. Yet the bottom line of life with Susan was a rewarding weekly experience for the Welcomat’s readers, advertisers, and employees. She was living proof of George Bernard Shaw’s famous axiom: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Or, in Susan’s case, an unreasonable woman. We should all be so eccentric.

The Inquirer’s Roberts revolution

And of course, there was the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published my column on its op-ed page for 19 years. Walter Annenberg, who for 27 years had used the paper as a personal tool to reward his friends and punish his perceived enemies, finally sold it in 1970 to the respected Knight Newspapers chain. Two years later the Knights hired Gene Roberts, national editor of the New York Times, to take charge of the Inquirer, and Roberts soon attracted a world-class staff, largely through the magnetic appeal of his reputation as a “reporter’s editor”— that is, one who gives reporters the freedom and encouragement to tackle ambitious projects.

Over the next 18 years, this outwardly shy, absent-minded, gnomelike executive editor transformed the Inquirer from one of America’s most despised newspapers to one of the most admired— from a paper that had never won a Pulitzer Prize to one that collected 17 during his tenure, and from a money-losing runner-up among Philadelphia’s newspapers to a profitable and undisputed leader.

Early in 2019— almost 30 years after he left— a documentary film tribute to the Inquirer’s glory years under Roberts was screened at a Philadelphia theater, attended by a large crowd of graying Inquirer alumni, including Roberts himself, by then 86 years old. During the question period that followed, I asked Roberts: “Suppose that today you were 40 years old again and national editor of the New York Times, as you were in 1972 when the Inquirer came calling. And suppose the Lenfest Institute invited you to revamp the Inquirer, as the Knight chain did in 1972. Would you accept that offer?”

Roberts diplomatically declined to speculate about a hypothetical situation. My guess was that today he would stick with the Times and its profit-driven family owners rather than risk restarting his career with a not-for-profit. But upon further reflection, Roberts would never receive such an offer from the Inquirer today, because bold gambits rarely emanate from not-for-profit institutions.

I know what you’re thinking: At least the Inquirer isn’t vulnerable to ego-driven billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who recently dismembered the distinguished Washington Post to ingratiate himself with Trump. And you’re quite right. At the end of the day, I feel about profit-driven journalism much the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy: It’s the worst of all systems, except for all the other systems.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com