TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/092589/09258900.010

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 5KB | 95 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."