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Daily Telegraph
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the papers
This page deals with some of the Hollinger titles. It
covers -
Context is provided by the broader communications and
media timeline on this site.
the Telegraph
The London-based Daily Telegraph - as of
2003 the largest circulation UK broadsheet - was founded
as the Daily Telegraph & Courier in 1855
by Colonel Arthur Sleigh, who sold it that year to printer
and publisher of the Sunday Times Joseph Moses
Levy (1812-1888).
The latter passed control to his son Edward (1833-1916),
who became Levy-Lawson on inheriting a fortune from uncle
Lionel Lawson in 1879 and was enobled in 1903 as the 1st
Baron Burnham after paying what he quipped was "the
going rate" for a peerage. In 1928 Levy-Lawson's
heirs sold the paper to Allied Newspapers, established
in 1924 by Edward Iliffe (1877-1960),
William Berry (1879-1954) and
Gomer Berry. William had acquired the Sunday Times
in 1915.
Restructuring of Allied in 1937 saw the brothers buy out
Iliffe and split their interests, with William - enobled
as 1st Viscount Camrose - retaining the Daily Telegraph.
In 1937 that paper absorbed the ailing Morning Post.
The Sunday Telegraph was founded in 1961. Difficulties
with management and finance saw the Berry family lose
control to Black.
Stephen Koss's The Rise & Fall of the Political Press
in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984) is indispensable
for understanding the Telegraph. Perspectives
are provided by William Deedes' Dear Bill: WF Deedes
Reports (London: Macmillan 2005), Duff Hart-Davis'
The House The Berrys Built (London: Hutchinson
1957), William Camrose: Giant of Fleet Street (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1992) by Michael Berry and other
works highlighted in the profile on the Berry
(Camrose and Kemsley) interests.
Extracts from the paper are featured in How We Saw
It: 150 Years of The Daily Telegraph 1855-2005 (London:
Ebury 2004) edited by Christopher Howse. An editor's-eye
view is provided in Dear Bill, WF Deedes Reports
(London: Macmillan 1997), the autobiography of William
Deedes. He is profiled in The Remarkable Lives of
Bill Deedes (London: Little, Brown 2008) by Stephen
Robinson.
the Jerusalem Post
The English-language daily Jerusalem Post traces
its origins to The Palestine Post, founded in
1932 by Gershon Agron (1894-1959). He had migrated from
the Ukraine to the US as a child, serving as a member
of the Jewish Legion in Palestine during the 1914-18 War
before working in the Press Office of the Zionist Commission,
as editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and as a correspondent
for the Manchester Guardian
and London Times. He was a member of the Jewish
Agency delegation to the UN conference in San Francisco,
headed Israel's official Information Service from 1949
to 1951 and was mayor of Jerusalem from 1955 to 1959.
The Palestine Post became the largest English
daily paper in Palestine. It supported the struggle for
a Jewish homeland, including opposition to UK government
restrictions on Jewish immigration during the Mandate
period. It reported on the birth of the new state (including
a car bomb attack against the Post's building
in 1948) becoming the Jerusalem Post in 1950.
An international weekly edition was launched in 1959,
reflecting both Agron's commitment to and recognition
that the domestic English-language audience was shrinking,
accompanied by increased political influence for competitors
such as Ha'aretz .
Ha'aretz was founded in Jerusalem during 1919
by a group of Zionist immigrants that included Ze'ev Jabotinsky.
It moved to Tel Aviv in 1922 and was acquired by Zalman
Schocken in 1935. The paper is currently controlled by
the Schocken family; DuMont
Schauberg acquired a 25% stake in 2006.
The Jerusalem Post was acquired by Hollinger
for US$17 million in 1988. In November 2004 Hollinger
International announced the sale of the Post
to Israeli media group Mirkaei Tikshoret for US$13.2 million.
As part of the deal CanWest was
to acquire a 50% stake from that group. Tel Aviv-based
Mirkaei Tikshoret is one of Israel's largest newspaper
publishers and broadcasters; holdings include radio and
television broadcasting, Russian-language daily newspapers,
Russian- and Hebrew-language weeklies and monthly magazines.
By early 2005 the deal had gone sour, with a US court
considering
claims and counter-claims.
The Jerusalem Post's online presence is here. An online
archive of the Palestine Post is here.
There has been no major English-language study of Agron.
For Schocken see Anthony David's The Patron: A Life
of Salman Schocken, 1877-1959 (New York: Holt 2004).
the Spectator and Apollo
The Spectator, a self-consciously crusty
UK conservative weekly magazine, dates from 1828. (It
should not be confused with the more sprightly daily
that ran from 1711 to 1714 after establishment by Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele.
The Spectator claims to be the oldest continually
published English language magazine and has been owned
by a succession of proprietors that included John St Loe
Strachey, Ian Gilmour, mining magnate Algy Cluff, Australia's
Fairfax group and Hollinger.
Like the Jerusalem Post its political influence
outweighs its small circulation. Hollinger somewhat tartly
noted that
the
Spectator has an impressive reputation as a
journal of opinion for the British intelligentsia, but
it is not an economically significant asset.
It
claims to embody UK "intelligent conservatism"
but in recent years has been noted for a sometimes rabid
euroscepticism, with Philip Howard quipping in 1976 that
the
character of The Spectator has had a personality
crisis approaching nervous breakdown over the past decade
… for 10 years it became loud and bigoted, a raving
right-winger ranting against the EEC.
Its
online presence is here.
Its history is explored in Simon Courtauld's To Convey
Intelligence: The Spectator 1928-98 (London: Profile
1999). A perspective is offered by Stephen Koss' invaluable
The Rise and Fall of the Political Press, Volume 2:
The Twentieth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984).
For Strachey see his The Adventure of Living: A Subjective
Autobiography, 1860-1922 (New York: Putnam 1922),
online here.
Dancing with Dogma (London: Simon & Schuster
1992) by under-appreciated Tory 'wet' intellectual, proprietor
and editor Ian Gilmour is of lasting value for its account
of Thatcherism.
Upmarket collectibles magazine Apollo, a competitor
of the Burlington Magazine founded by Roger Fry
and later owned by Thomson,
was formerly owned by Gert-Rudolf Flick, an heir of the
very unpleasant industrialist Friedrich Flick.
the Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times traces its origins
to the 1948 amalgamation of the Daily Times (published
1929-48) and the daily Sun (1941-48).
The Sun was founded by retail heir Marshall Field
III (1893-1956) in opposition to the McCormick's Chicago
Tribune. He had earlier backed Ralph Ingersoll's
PM and was publisher of Parade magazine.
Field purchased publishers Simon & Schuster and Pocket
Books in 1944 and gained control of the Chicago Daily
Times in 1947. His son Marshall Field IV (1916-65)
acquired the Chicago Daily News in 1959, serving
as publisher and editor of the Sun-Times and
the Daily News, which ceased publication
in 1978. Marshall Field V (1941- ) was publisher of the
Sun-Times from 1969 to 1980. The Sun-Times group
was acquired by Murdoch's News
in 1984 for US$90 million and expanded in the 1980s through
acquisition of Chicago suburban newspapers, notably the
Star chain.
News sold the group in 1986 to Robert Page and LBO specialist
Adler & Shaykin for US$145 million. Murdoch's acquisition
of Chicago Channel 32 for the Fox Network involved disposal
of the papers to comply with a then federal prohibition
against owning major newspapers and stations in the same
market.
Hollinger's American Publishing Company (APC) acquired
the ailing Sun-Times and its healthier associated
titles in 1994 for around US$180 million.
There has been no major study of the Sun-Times
and associated titles. For the Fields see Stephen Becker's
Marshall Field III (New York: Simon & Schuster
1964) and Axel Madsen's The Marshall Fields: The Evolution
of an American Business Dynasty (New York: Wiley
2002).
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