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Features
DAD ROASTS DEVIL TOT
Remembering when the Press-Telegram was the most important paper in town
Burt Fleischman was a man of perpetual motion and one-track mind—perfect characteristics for a single-copy sales manager, the guy in charge of selling the Press-Telegram’s street edition more than a quarter-century ago. All the dailies used to have a street edition, a paper sold only on the newsracks, and the single-copy sales managers from each newspaper were very aggressive about outselling each other.
The key to the street edition was a huge front-page headline over some story—an important story, hopefully, although salacious was almost always better. The duty of choosing that story and writing the headline fell to the last man on the nightly news desk. During one memorable era at the Press-Telegram, that man was Andy Stephenson, a crusty old-timer who’d gotten his start at a London tabloid, where writing outrageous headlines was an art form.
One late night, Andy chose the story of a man in San Bernardino, who had flipped out and come to believe that his infant son was the devil. The insane father threw his helpless baby into the floor furnace.
The next morning’s headline in the Press-Telegram newsracks: DAD ROASTS DEVIL TOT.
It was shocking, and the bigwigs at the Press-Telegram hurriedly called a big meeting, where there was a great wailing that eventually morphed into a meditation on professionalism, decency and civic responsibility.
In the middle of this high-minded ethical discussion, Burt Fleischman burst into the room with a wide grin on his face.
“Great headline this morning!” he shouted. “Sold the hell out of it!”
Meeting adjourned.
The Press-Telegram is dying, like daily newspapers everywhere, and the people who own and run them want you to believe it’s murder—that they’re the helpless victims of advancing technology and changing public tastes.
Don’t. Computers and cell phones and television and the next-shiny-things are not so much killers as accomplices to suicide.
Newspapers have bound and gagged themselves, slit their own throats, abandoned themselves to bleed—and bore us—to death by order of their corporate-raider owners and corporate-tool managers. That’s been the story of the Press-Telegram for a long time—during its final years as a link in the now-deceased Knight-Ridder chain, and especially since December of 1997, when it was purchased by Denver-based MediaNews Group, headed by the brutal Dean Singleton. Both corporate owners slashed the Press-Telegram’s staff and budget—read: quality journalism—to achieve rich returns on investment.
“Newspapers make a heckuva profit,” points out Ian Lamont, who was Press-Telegram publisher from 2001 to 2004. “Most businesses live on three- and five-percent margins. Until very recently, newspapers have been making 30 percent.”
Even in tough times—like 2007—MediaNews’ net income rose 34 percent in the fourth quarter. Still, the company is claiming poverty, mostly through the voices of its marionettes in local management.
“Our business is suffering,” Press-Telegram executive editor Rich Archbold told the City Council on March 4. “I don’t have to tell you what is happening nationally.”
“The demographics of Long Beach have changed over the years,” former executive editor Larry Allison—who now oversees the opinion page—told a crowd at the Beer & Politics forum at Gallagher’s Pub on March 25. “It’s less of a classic newspaper audience.”
Not according to Lamont, who was Archbold’s and Allison’s boss.
“It’s possible to grow a newspaper in Long Beach when you do things well,” he insists. “When I became Press-Telegram publisher in 2001, our circulation was 94,000, and when I left in 2004, it was 126,000. You see what’s happened since: I had 45 reporters, now there are 10 and circulation is down to 88,000.
“The readers and the advertisers aren’t stupid. You’ve got to give them a great product if you want them to read and buy. The Press-Telegram is in a death spiral because you can’t keep cutting your way to profitability.”
Singleton has been using Press-Telegram profits and borrowed money to purchase more and more suburban papers—he’s got rings of them around Los Angeles and San Francisco—and huge balloon payments are due in 2009. Singleton’s focus isn’t a journalistic responsibility to the community; it’s debt service on his expanding financial empire.
Lamont witnessed that firsthand when Singleton moved him from the Press-Telegram to the Bay Area, where he became CEO of 18 troubled MediaNews Group newspapers.
“I came up with a plan, and Dean Singleton dismissed it out of hand,” Lamont says. “He dismissed it because it involved investment in the newsroom, signing a contract with the union and bringing in some talent. That’s when I really got my eyes opened: Singleton had no interest in that. It only took me six months and I quit. How can you work for someone you don’t respect?”
One sunny spring day a couple of weeks ago, about 50 people sacrificed their lunch hour to chant slogans and wave picket signs on the sidewalk outside the Arco Towers on Ocean Boulevard, where what’s left of what’s still called the Press-Telegram fits easily on the 14th floor. They were protesting the latest round in a dozen years of staff cuts that this time had finally reached the top—the paper’s publisher and managing editor.
Mark Ficarra, the just-appointed publisher of the Torrance Daily Breeze—most prominent entry on his resume: the Pennysaver—is now in charge of the Press-Telegram, which effectively transforms Long Beach’s 110-year-old daily paper into a South Bay satellite.
Long Beach City Councilwomen Tonia Reyes Uranga and Bonnie Lowenthal—campaigning against one another for the 54th District seat in the state Assembly—marched with the small group, delivered short speeches and threatened to cut off the approximately $250,000 a year the city spends advertising with the newspaper.
Meanwhile, one flight up from the street, Press-Telegram executive editor Rich Archbold leaned against the railing of an outdoor plaza and sipped a soft drink from a large paper cup, watching quietly as his little staff and their loyal supporters clamored for the lost causes that their careers and quality daily journalism in Long Beach have become.
Archbold had seen it many times. His employees have been demonstrating—in fewer and fewer numbers as his staff has been reduced—throughout his nearly 30 years as a Press-Telegram executive. He’s nearly 70 now, and as he approaches the end of his own career—which has coincided almost exactly with the paper’s dwindling fortunes—it was hard to imagine what he might be thinking. I e-mailed him, asking if I could call him with that question. He ignored the interview request, but replied with this:
Dave—Here are my thoughts on watching the different demonstrations:
“The journalists in the Press-Telegram newsroom exude passion. They care about our readers and they care about the Press-Telegram. So when I see them demonstrating I feel they are doing that because they care about the newspaper and how we’re reaching the communities we serve.
“They have a right to march and plead their cause. They want a fair contract and so do we. I hope we can agree on a new contract as soon as possible so we can focus all of our attention on producing the most dominant daily newspaper in our market.”
Thanks, Rich
Last month, the Los Angeles Times appointed Russ Stanton as its fourth executive editor in three years. Each of the previous three—James E. O’Shea, Dean Baquet and John S. Carroll—resigned or were fired for refusing to implement staff and news coverage cuts demanded by the corporate owner.
Of course, all of them had accepted the job knowing that the corporation expected them to make drastic cuts. All of them did, for a while. Eventually, however, each reached a point where he refused to go further, explaining that he could not carry out the corporate mandate without sacrificing his personal integrity and the ethics of his profession.
Mark Wigginton came to the Press-Telegram in 1977 with only two years of experience. When he left 10 years later, after stints as a reporter and photo and graphics editor, he felt as worldly as the grizzled reporters who had barely greeted him when he arrived, gruffly nurtured him during his stay and embarrassedly hugged him goodbye.
“I remember the cool things we accomplished—beating the Times for a couple of days on a jet crash story in Cerritos, until they brought in the whole world on it,” recalls Wigginton, who now runs an auto-racing track in Portland, Oregon.
“I remember when [reporter] Bob Zeller did a long investigative piece on the 10 worst cops in Long Beach during a time of police abuse. One of the officers on the list was the son of the lead political writer for the paper. I remember Rich calling the reporter in and laying it out for him. The reporter looked at the evidence and said, ‘Looks like you got him. Go with it.’”
Keith Campbell was a printer, a guy who set and proofread type in the third-floor composing room after it had been whooshed up through pneumatic tubes from the second-floor newsroom. He was a droll and prickly guy, who adamantly enforced the union rule that only a typesetter could touch the type. He could be difficult to work with.
Manufacturing a newspaper used to require collaboration among all kinds of people—printers and pressmen and mailers and truck drivers—all at the same plant. There was a balance in the process, between reporters and artists, on one hand, and all these other people who weren’t journalism dweebs. Like the time the Long Beach Opera had to curtail its season because of a budget crisis. The higher-ups treated it as the biggest story of the year. They fretted about where it should go on the page, how big the type should be.
As they debated, Keith Campbell—obviously not an opera buff—read the story. When he finished its overwrought tale, he looked up at the concerned faces around him, nodded a deadpan I-see-what-you-mean, and said sarcastically, “I think I’m gonna kill myself.”
“The downturn started when Knight-Ridder demoted Larry Allison from executive editor,” says Bill Hillburg, whose career at the Press-Telegram spanned its changes in personality; between 1979 and 2003 he served as a reporter, the news editor, a columnist and a Washington correspondent.
“Larry was a lifetime Long Beach newspaper guy who knew the city and the business—a little too much of a City Hall apologist for me, but at least he could make a coherent argument for his opinion.” Allison was replaced by Saundra Keyes, a former assistant professor of English at Fisk University.
“Somebody somewhere somehow concluded that she qualified to be the executive editor of a metropolitan newspaper because of her Master’s and Ph.D. in folklore,” Hillburg says bewilderedly.
Keyes used her grant writing background in academia to secure funding for a major diversification of the Press-Telegram staff, which was intended to extend coverage into socio-ethnic areas that were often ignored.
“That was great,” says Hillburg, “but things began devolving when we started having writing seminars and reporting retreats. We had great reporters—Mary Neiswender, Molly Burrell—who couldn’t have cared less if they had a sparkling lead; they just wanted to get the news in the paper. We didn’t need retreats. Every day the room was full of people you could learn something from.”
Before Keyes’ philosophy became ensconced in Press-Telegram culture, however, she was kicked up the corporate ladder. Knight-Ridder’s financial commitment to a larger and more diverse staff went with her.
Enter Jim Crutchfield, whose four strange years as the Press-Telegram’s executive editor may be best epitomized by the mid-October day in 1995 when he was the only person in the planning meeting to argue against putting the Million Man March on the front page. Organized by Nation of Islam leader Rev. Louis Farrakhan on Washington’s National Mall, the Million Man March attracted hundreds of thousands of African-American men from throughout the country to advocate “unity, atonement and brotherhood” and to pledge to “clean up their lives and rebuild their neighborhoods.”
It was unquestionably the story of the day—had been for weeks—but Crutchfield needed convincing. The process was especially delicate, professionally and personally, because Crutchfield was also the only African-American man in the room.
TO: All Employees
FROM: Rick Sadowski, Publisher
DATE: December 14, 1995
As we approach the holiday season, it is time for us to formally thank our valued colleagues who have left or will be leaving the Press-Telegram before the end of this year.
The 53 people listed below have a cumulative service with the company of 1,030 years. It is impossible to ignore the importance of the experience and dedication these employees have exhibited over so many years. Please join me in wishing this talented group of people continued good health and success in the future.
The Press-Telegram paid me $39,950.54 to go away, but I still cried on the drive home. The buyout couldn’t fully compensate for the fact that, for the first time in almost 24 years, I wouldn’t be coming back. Thankfully, I didn’t yet know that Long Beach’s great daily newspaper wouldn’t be, either.
I’d arrived at the big birthday cake of a building at Sixth and Pine in July 1972 as a 16-year-old, $2-an-hour copy boy on the sports desk—a position the smartass veterans called the “urch”—while still splitting time as editor of the Bellflower High School paper. It seemed a miracle when the work we did each night landed on the lawn of every house in my neighborhood the next morning.
By the end of 1995, I was a 40-year-old smartass veteran, too. Over the years I’d accumulated a story-by-story resume that ranged from Poly-Wilson football games to Super Bowls, from Senior Center tap-dancing classes to the Academy Awards, from the collective celebration that accompanied the 1984 Olympics to the riotous outrage that followed the Rodney King verdicts in 1992, from the emergence of Snoop Dogg to the end of the Long Beach Civic Light Opera.
Along the way I’d also acquired a condition known as “recovering alcoholic/crack addict.” I had the Press-Telegram to thank for all of it, most especially the stint in rehab that was 80 percent paid for by the Employee Assistance Program included in the collectively bargained contract between the newspaper’s management and the employees union.
Good times.
The worst was yet to come. The more-than-a-millennium of experience that was ectomied from the Press-Telegram at the end of 1995—an average of almost 20 years per person—ripped so much life from the paper that it looked attractive to a corporate vulture like Singleton’s MediaNews Group.
At the end of 1997, he swooped in with a $44 million offer, then immediately began making back his money by wringing it out of his employees—and through ripple effect, on his readers and their cities, which for years had relied on the Press-Telegram as a tool of community.
To avoid complications—and the union contract—Singleton and Knight-Ridder structured their transaction as an “asset sale,” meaning MediaNews wasn’t buying the Press-Telegram, just its equipment. According to this trick, there wasn’t a Press-Telegram, anymore—and thus, no employees. Everybody had to reapply for their jobs at a brand new newspaper, which coincidently would be called . . . the Press-Telegram!
Applicants were told that resumes and work samples were unnecessary. They quickly realized that the real purpose of the process was a legal defense against possible charges of union busting and firing without just cause—that, and weeding out bad attitudes.
The interviews took from three to 15 minutes and ranged from baffling to humiliating.
Sometimes they were conversations about the weather, football, freeway traffic or restaurants. But some women were asked if they had children. One was forced to reveal that, no, she had no children because her only son had recently committed suicide. Another felt obliged to admit that she and her husband were struggling to conceive. Ultimately, the rehires had their wages cut 21 percent and their benefits shaved to nubs.
Some of those instant profits were packaged into secret bonuses for management personnel—equal to one year’s pay—in return for their promise to stay through the transition, the better to minimize any problems with the shafted rank-and-file.
The sobbing in the Press-Telegram halls that accompanied the historic crumbling of a once-proud newspaper on its 100th anniversary signaled a windfall for the long-stalled career of Rich Archbold.
For nearly 20 years, Knight-Ridder had failed to promote Archbold from his position as managing editor. But Singleton quickly elevated him to editor-in-chief. If the Press-Telegram staff needed proof of which way the paper was headed, this was it.
“Rich had never seemed to have much intellectual curiosity,” says Hillburg. “He came to Long Beach from the Miami Herald as kind of a nobody, and suddenly he was somebody. I think it went to his head and stayed in his head.
“He lost sight of what we were there for. He became kind of a booster boy, you might say. I always thought of him as Babbitt, one of those we’re-going-to-put-this-town-on-the-map fellows, without looking at it carefully. Although he was managing editor of a big-city newspaper, Rich behaved like the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Hooterville, and the Press-Telegram reflected it.”
Perhaps the most extreme example was when President Bill Clinton came to Long Beach in February of 1996. Clinton had closed the Long Beach Naval Base—saving the one in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because it had primary voters he needed for re-election—and signed the death sentence for the local aerospace industry. He was coming to town to tout a sad job retraining program.
On the morning he arrived, the Press-Telegram bannered a huge headline that read: WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT! The 1,237-word story read nothing like journalism, but instead like a convention bureau’s in-room hotel magazine:
MEMO TO: President Clinton
FROM: The people of Long Beach
RE: Background for the day’s agenda
Good morning and welcome to Long Beach, Mr. President. You’ll see a lot of people happy that you have come to our city today. And none will be happier than Long Beach’s elected leaders, who long have been anxious to host you. Those officials are eager to update you—and be updated by you—on an agenda that by now must seem a bit familiar . . .
“The staff was humiliated,” says Hillburg. “When I mention the Press-Telegram to journalists around the country, they still ask me about it: ‘Um, did you really run a WELCOME, MR. PRESIDENT! headline on the front page?’ But Rich was so proud that he had that paper framed and mounted in the conference room.”
Oh, for the days of DAD ROASTS DEVIL TOT.
“Well, the pandering coverage of the last 15 years certainly hasn’t generated any respect or revenue for the Press-Telegram,” says Hillburg. “If the paper was in trouble and it was benefiting from playing ball with friends and insiders, maybe you could see some kind of rationale for it. Instead, people derided and avoided the Press-Telegram—talked it down and didn’t advertise. That’s why it’s in this mess.”
Tags: Daily Breeze, daily newspapers, dean singleton, journalism, Long Beach, medianews group, press telegram
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