TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092589/09258900.010

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.4 KB | 106 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 60

Sun-Rise in St. Louis


A new metropolitan daily is packaged for the video era

By William A. Henry III


    The dream of becoming a latter-day Citizen Hearst seems
emblazoned upon the American entrepreneurial psyche. Over the
past half-century, dozens of metropolitan papers have shut down
and few have been salvaged. None have been launched successfully
since New York's Newsday in 1940. Yet would-be publishers keep
emerging; the example of others' failures seems only to add to
the imagined glory.

    Three things make next week's debut of the St. Louis Sun a
little different. First, owner Ralph Ingersoll II, 43, is no
self-deluding newcomer but a crafty revamper of smaller papers
whose privately held companies have sales that place them among
the top dozen U.S. newspaper groups -- and whose biggest
concentration of holdings is in the suburbs of St. Louis.
Second, Ingersoll has inherited knowledge about the trials of
a big-city start-up: his late father Ralph, a onetime general
manager of Time Inc., founded the critically acclaimed New York
City daily PM, which lasted eight years in the 1940s. Third, the
Sun is not reaching for the stars.

    The city's Post-Dispatch, founded in 1878 by Joseph
Pulitzer and controlled by his descendants, seems entrenched
(circ. 378,255). The competing Globe-Democrat, which announced
its closing three times in three years, finally folded in 1986.
But Ingersoll contends that the P.D. fails to serve the market.
"Two-thirds of the households do not read the Post-Dispatch,"
he claims. "The great challenge is that two-thirds, the
unwashed, if you will, who are simply not interested." To reach
them, the Sun will be a color-splashed tabloid "for today's
video world." Post-Dispatch chairman Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who
disputes Ingersoll's figures, declares, "We defend our
franchise, and we will be vigorously competitive."

    Ingersoll splurged $20 million on such items as a printing
plant, electronic facsimile equipment and 5,000 scarlet vending
machines, but he is spending relatively little on a reporting
staff because the paper's emphasis is on packaging news more
than on unearthing it. Advertisers were promised a circulation
of 75,000; some 41,000 subscribers are said to have signed
already.

    The 40 Ingersoll dailies and 200-plus weeklies are mostly
undistinguished moneymakers. An intellectual who counts Samuel
Beckett as his favorite writer, Ingersoll nonetheless publishes
papers that condescend; they entertain more than educate or
inform. He blasts other newspapers for giving reporters free
reign to pursue investigative and analytic stories he considers
of limited interest. Says Ingersoll: "There has been a general
breakdown of discipline in American newsrooms in the past
generation. It got to the point by the early '80s where you
couldn't get the best young reporters to aspire to be editors
anymore."

    The Sun, he decrees, will be "top-heavy with editors." Much
of their role will be to imitate editors elsewhere, notably
those of the British tabloids (one of Ingersoll's heroes is
Rupert Murdoch) and the breezy, chipper Toronto Sun, whose
owners flirted with investing in the St. Louis project.
Ingersoll is borrowing blatantly from USA Today, to the extent
of labeling the new paper's sections Money, Life and Sports.
Pages of USA Today are taped on a wall next to a sign reading
YOUR GUIDE TO EXCELLENCE. Despite the Sun's derivative quality,
Ingersoll describes the paper as "my PM, in the sense that it's
creative and no one else has had the gumption to do it."

    Gumption or no, skeptics perceive an Oedipal element behind
the enterprise. After joining the small-paper business launched
by his father, the younger Ingersoll clashed with him early and
often, tried to break free, then forced him out of the
partnership in a financial settlement that the elder Ingersoll
considered unfair. Thereafter, father and son spoke
infrequently. Ingersoll blames the tension largely on his
stepmother; at his father's funeral in 1985, the widow and the
namesake son held separate receptions.

    One major conflict was over financing. The father was
cautious, the son a plunger. Says Ingersoll: "He was still
thinking in hundreds of thousands when I was thinking in
millions. He never really understood the fungibility of debt and
equity." Later, capital for some deals was assembled by indicted
Drexel junk-bond financier Michael Milken, whom Ingersoll
regards as a close friend. Says media analyst John Morton of
Lynch Jones & Ryan in Washington: "From all we can learn, the
company is healthy, although heavily leveraged. The small papers
are cash cows. I admire him for taking this risky venture. But
I'm from Missouri on this one -- he'll have to show me."

    Though Ingersoll concedes there is some financial risk, he
argues that "launching the Sun is likely to turn out on an
investment basis to be the best deal we've ever made. For the
same amount of money, I could buy something boring that I've
done umpteen times over that has the potential to earn, pretax,
perhaps $2 million. The Sun has the potential to earn 15 times
that. So from a risk-reward viewpoint -- which isn't why I did
it -- it makes sense. From a creative viewpoint, it has a lot
to do with how our newspapers will operate in the '90s."