by James O'Shea
Brumback went along with the deal, but not with Dowdle. When the time came, he passed over Dowdle to anoint Madigan heir apparent. Although both men were stoic professionals, Dowdle was indisputably the visionary leader of the two, a man who thought more creatively than an investment banker adept at corporate politics and operating results. But Dowdle’s misfortune elevated FitzSimons and gave him a shot at becoming the first broadcasting executive to run Tribune Company. When Dowdle decided to retire, FitzSimons stood at the helm of the company’s most profitable division.
As the deputy managing editor for news at the Chicago Tribune, I didn’t know FitzSimons, though, of course, I knew of him. Paralleling FitzSimons’ rise through Tribune ranks was a phenomenon known as “market-driven journalism,” which would lead to news shows that were more like tabloids than serious, sober news. Media scholars trace the roots of market-driven journalism to the late 1960s when television station owners discovered they could meet FCC public service requirements and attract advertising audiences by creating local newscasts with popular appeal rather than traditional journalistic fare. Enlisting help from media consultants or “show doctors,” they fashioned newscasts that forced politicians to compete for headlines with the likes of pop-tarts like Britney Spears. And it worked. Market-driven journalism was more successful than anyone could have imagined. Not only did the news shows attract viewers, they could also be used as public service content to meet FCC requirements and round out the fare on stations of all types.
Although many print journalists scorned the trend as pandering, the new news had its fans in print: “Somewhere in the late 1960s, what I call the stuff-pot factor took over,” noted John Walter, a managing editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in the 1980s. “Stories lengthened. Attitudes toward stories changed. And we, the institution, became so convinced of our mission to save the world and comment soberly on it that we veered away from what we had. We’d been dulling newspapers up. Now we’re returning to the ‘I didn’t know that’ factor, where news is anything that will capture your interest and make you turn to the next page because you don’t know what wonder and revelation will be cast upon you.”
Unlike newspapers, which relied on circulation and advertising revenues, local television news relied more heavily on cash from advertising, giving television station managers a powerful incentive to promote sensational news reports that would attract viewers. Tribune stations racked up profit margins of 30 percent or more, drawing the attention of Wall Street and pressuring newspaper editors to embrace marketing strategies in an effort to stem the decline in circulation that had begun in the 1980s.
In one of the few studies ever done on the subject, John H. McManus, a California journalism professor and media critic, found evidence that local broadcasters usually subordinated journalism to “market logic” when the two forces conflicted: “Market selection logic is straight-forward.... To maximize returns to investors, the newsroom should pick those issues and events that have the greatest ratio of expected appeal for demographically desirable audiences to the cost of news gathering. Further, stories should advance, or at least minimize harm to, the interests of advertisers and investors.” Such values, of course, repulsed newspaper editors like me.
Madigan had put Fuller in charge of the publishing division, and Fuller in 1993 had named Howard Tyner, a former Tribune foreign correspondent, as editor of the Chicago Tribune. Tyner delegated the job of running the newsroom to his subordinates, people like F. Richard Ciccone, a seasoned managing editor and ace political reporter, Lipinski, and me. Tyner then focused on managing Fuller and creating the newsroom that Brumback wanted, one with a TV camera nearby.
As a person who spent his career as a print reporter, I didn’t know many television journalists well. Although print reporters were a competitive lot who would sacrifice their firstborn to break a story, most dismissed local broadcast journalists as lightweights focused on anything that made good film, particularly crime and sensationalistic “watchdog” reports that newspaper editors would relegate to metro. As Tyner started pushing Brumback’s “synergistic” journalism, I got to know more television reporters and editors, particularly through our Washington bureau.
Brumback had authorized millions of dollars to turn the Chicago Tribune Washington bureau into the Tribune Media Center that housed all Tribune Company papers as well as a television operation headed by Cissy Baker, a former CNN journalist whose father, Howard Baker, had been a senator and remained a big-wig in the Republican Party. A competent journalist with good political connections in a town where they counted, Baker proved easy to work with, but our instincts about what stories to chase were almost magnetically opposed. To help Baker in Washington, Tyner installed Jim Warren as the Chicago Tribune bureau chief. A rising star in Chicago, Warren was a first-rate journalist who happened to have fantastic television presence. But even Warren, a proponent of synergy, admitted that his discussions with Tribune station directors around the country made it clear they were not interested in the kind of substantial news stories that his print bosses demanded. The saying “If it bleeds, it leads” was, Warren told me, no exaggeration.
As editors in Washington and Chicago scrummed over how to work together, FitzSimons’ ascension to Dowdle’s former job created rampant speculation about who would succeed Madigan as CEO—Broadcasting’s FitzSimons or Publishing’s Fuller. Madigan didn’t tip his hand for a while. He enjoyed basking in the glow of the CEO title. Though he had been overshadowed by Brumback, Madigan had great timing and did a great job running Tribune if one judged him by the yardstick most CEOs looked at—the company’s market capitalization, or the price of a share of Tribune stock multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. When he took over at Tribune, the company’sIs market capitalization was $4.3 billion. By the time he stepped down, it was a jaw-dropping $17 billion. But when Madigan, who knew that Wall Street needed a succession plan to maintain confidence in the company as a sound investment, promoted FitzSimons to executive vice president of Tribune Company in 2000, the die was cast.
As soon as it was apparent that FitzSimons would be the next CEO, Tyner summoned me to his office and asked me to help educate the new boss about what journalists do, just as I had with Madigan. FitzSimons, Tyner warned me, had sharp views about our craft, particularly regarding some of our columnists and the way we selected news for page one. I told him I understood, but largely, I naïvely viewed the opportunity of face time as a chance to shine the lights of Tribune Broadcasting’s television cameras on the company’s journalism.
My first meeting with FitzSimons, in which we discussed our respective backgrounds, was cordial. I floated the idea of a visit to the Washington bureau, Congress, or the White House press room, or to one of our international bureaus to see how we operated and to get a firsthand look at what journalists did every day. But FitzSimons seemed uninterested. Instead of taking me up on my invitation, he launched into an explanation of how things were done in the broadcast world. “I’m always being accused of looking at everything through the broadcast model,” he said, “and I don’t want to do that.” Quickly, he turned the conversation toward David Greising, a business columnist he clearly disliked, and wondered aloud why we would have a business columnist with populist leanings—a ridiculous claim (I had hired Greising when he was Atlanta bureau chief for Business Week magazine, not exactly a hotbed of populism). Notably, Greising had angered local CEOs in his columns when he challenged them (sometimes relying on humor to make his point) about everything from slumping earnings to obsessive secrecy. But FitzSimons let me know that he didn’t think Greising was funny. I left our meeting feeling that my work was cut out for me.
In naming FitzSimons the new CEO of Tribune, Madigan and the board had passed over Fuller, the highly regarded editorial writer, former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher, and Pulitzer winner. As he rose through the ranks at Tribune, FitzSimons had zealously championed the values of the broadcaster, and his ideals often cla
shed with editorial. With FitzSimons as the head of broadcasting, Tribune had continued its breathtaking acquisitions of television stations, and he was pushing the company to buy the Chris-Craft group of stations, the sole remaining block of independent stations that represented a competitive threat to Tribune. Instead, Madigan decided to buy Times Mirror, an initiative strongly backed by Fuller. Why, then, had Madigan anointed FitzSimons as the presumptive CEO?
Doubtless, because FitzSimons went over better on Wall Street than the so-called professor. And the company needed to recover from the curve ball Madigan had thrown at institutional investors when he acquired an old-line newspaper company that hardly fit in with the string of TV stations Tribune Company had recently added to its portfolio. “One of the issues that caused distress was that a lot of people who had bought into Tribune, you know, big institutions, thought Tribune was shifting into broadcasting,” Hiller recalled, “and among that cadre of shareholders, there was a fair amount of indigestion about going heavily back towards newspapers, and some of them thought that it was an unsignaled bait-and-switch and they didn’t like it.” Putting a broadcast executive in charge of the company was an effective correction to appease people who played a big role in setting the price of Tribune stock. Besides, Madigan, like Cook, was always impressed with personal appearances, and FitzSimons truly looked like a CEO.
Soon after my meeting with FitzSimons, I made an appointment with Pat Mullen, the man he’d handpicked to succeed him to run Tribune Broadcasting. I wanted to talk to him about launching the kind of synergy I was interested in—a local or national public service television show featuring Tribune’s team of talented journalists with big-name guests to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. When I described the show, Mullen seemed discombobulated. He failed to understand why anyone would tune in to that kind of show. He asked me if I had talked to any station managers. When I said I thought he, as the head of broadcast, was the one to make those sorts of inquiries, he informed me that he couldn’t do anything until I had talked to them and won their support.
My meeting with Mullen simply confirmed my fears about broadcast executives: They seemed like dunces. In the months to come, I would learn that there were indeed smart and thoughtful individuals toiling in broadcast, but they usually kept their mouths shut for fear of being driven out for challenging FitzSimons’ protocol. Like many Tribune executives, FitzSimons felt threatened by people who weren’t of similar ilk. At heart, FitzSimons was a political conservative and staunch Catholic who was intolerant of a world with gay rights and labor unions. He preferred the more comfortable domain of a broadcaster, one dominated by market analysis and local news.
In 2001, just before September 11, Madigan announced that FitzSimons would become president and chief operating officer of Tribune Company, a step away from the CEO title he would get in 2003. And, by then, undoubtedly, FitzSimons would have the chops for the top job. Although Fuller had started cutting costs and integrating the temperamental Times Mirror papers into the Tribune fold, the process was as rugged as covering the war in Vietnam. FitzSimons simply had a better story.
By 2001, Tribune owned twenty-three television stations, including sixteen affiliated with the WB Network, which featured programming designed to appeal to the lucrative eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. When you combined its television stations with the more limited reach of its newspapers, the company could reach 34 percent of American households, which resembled the national TV networks. The proportion of profits churned out by the broadcast division exceeded its contributions to revenue, too. FitzSimons’s television properties accounted for about 28 percent of Tribune’s revenues but 39 percent of its profits, a stellar performance that got him the top job. Now he faced the challenge of whipping the newspapers into shape to make them market-driven purveyors of local news, while making a profit like the TV stations.
My views of FitzSimons evolved the more I engaged with him, particularly once Lipinski elevated me to managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, a job that placed me in control of the paper’s newsroom. As we interacted, I began to discover the depth of FitzSimons’ conservative roots.
When I told FitzSimons that we should revive Newsday’s failed effort to publish an edition for New York City, he, to my surprise, agreed. A New York edition, he offered, would at least provide an alternative to the left-wing New York Times. When the Chicago Tribune featured a photograph of two men kissing after a Massachusetts court ruling approved of gay marriage, FitzSimons stopped me on the street to ask why the Chicago Tribune would ever run such an image on page one.
Although he was hardly as blunt or direct as the broadcasters McManus studied, FitzSimons clearly was in the “market-driven journalism” camp. I found him to be smart, hard working, honest, dedicated, determined, talented, and ambitious. But in my experience he could also be petty, mean-spirited, and almost obsessively single-minded. I think his tendency to be a meddling micro-manager also exposed his hostility to journalists. He said he didn’t understand why a newspaper editor who presided over declines in circulation shouldn’t be fired, just as a station manager with tepid ratings in broadcast would be.
Those of us in editorial countered that newspaper editors were not running popularity contests; if they were doing their jobs, they would routinely anger readers and vested interests in the community. But FitzSimons didn’t completely buy it. He thought that journalists, like broadcasters, should use market research to give readers what they wanted, not news that some high priest of the news cycle deemed important.
Over the years, I’d seen many market surveys asking readers what they wanted in their news pages. If all we had to do was ask readers what they wanted and then give it to them, surely someone would have complied long ago and a winning formula would have been devised. FitzSimons correctly tried to get the journalists at the Tribune to focus on issues that no one wanted to confront, ones that questioned the value of stellar journalism if fewer people bought or read our newspaper. And the truth be told, editors like me did a poor job defending ourselves; we often retreated behind the wall separating the business and editorial sides and refused to take responsibility for declines in readership. But the problems weren’t that simple, easy, or honest.
FitzSimons’ drive to instill a marketing discipline into news soon created a surging tide of conflict at the company’s newspapers. Just after he took over, FitzSimons ordered readership surveys for all Tribune papers, including some that compared how journalists regarded their papers with the views of readers. The results proved that readers and journalists were not always in sync.
FitzSimons and the like-minded publishers he began to appoint took aim at the journalism of papers like the Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, arguing that readers wanted local news, not long, complicated stories like one I had ordered up examining the struggle for the soul of Islam in the wake of September 11. If you just looked at the readership surveys, FitzSimons was right: The average reader in Southern California ranked his or her top news interests in order of relevance as local, Southern California, national, and news about the economy. But if you overlaid onto the charts the interests of the Times most dedicated readers, they reflected a different set of priorities: national, international, national government, politics, and arts and entertainment.
The discussions roiling the ranks at Tribune rarely grappled with the significant but subtle differences; the research was widely viewed as an assault on journalistic principles, with FitzSimons and his marketing hawks leading the charge. If someone challenged the results of his market surveys, FitzSimons doubled down to overwhelm them with the zeal of an evangelist smiting his opponents, particularly newspaper editors who, in his mind, were more interested in impressing their friends with Pulitzer Prizes than winning readers by giving them what they wanted.
“He [FitzSimons] wanted to edit the paper by referendum,” Carroll recalled. “To him, news judgment and marketing were the same thing. I had this feeling from Dennis
that we should judge what we put on page one based on marketing. He didn’t want any complaints. My judgment was that we should get complaints. That is part of being a vibrant voice in the community.”
FitzSimons didn’t appreciate how fundamentally the newspaper operation that Fuller had built differed from his baby, the broadcast division. At the Tribune, Fuller picked people for leadership positions who sometimes disagreed with him, gutsy editors like Lipinski or Carroll. In Tribune Broadcasting, FitzSimons had selected his cronies—people like Mullen, a loyal soldier who towed the line.
Perhaps more shocking and disheartening to me even than FitzSimons’ market-driven approach to news and his disregard for subjects he didn’t agree with was his lack of curiosity. Once every three or four years, the Chicago Tribune convened a conference where national and foreign correspondents could get some face time with their bosses and discuss the stories that would be big news on their beats over the coming months and years. It was a great exercise that gave editors a chance to hear about upcoming news stories and reporters an opportunity to meet with fellow correspondents and the home office. Madigan had relished the conferences, often bringing his wife along, and offering editors seats on the company jet. Because the Chicago Tribune had fewer correspondents than the Los Angeles Times or other major papers, the Tribune’s eleven foreign correspondents covered wide swaths of territory. Listening to their reports about their beats usually gave attendees an expansive view of developments that would be making global news headlines over the coming months. Many of the stories our foreign reporters were covering were destined to be the sorts of investigative journalism projects for which the Tribune was known. In 2003, I saw our upcoming conference in Istanbul as an excellent opportunity for educating FitzSimons about journalism, and to my surprise he agreed to attend.