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Overview
This profile considers Ralph Ingersoll, father and son,
and the Journal Register Co group.
It covers -
introduction
Crusading liberal Ralph Ingersoll, perhaps influenced
by service as editor of Henry Luce's flagship publications
during the 1930s, launched the innovative PM
newspaper in New York shortly prior to the 1939-45 War.
AJ Liebling
wrote, with perhaps more verve than justice, that
When
you read it steadily for a while, you got the impression
that you were reading the publication of some such large
order as the Lonely Hearts or the American Treehound
Association, whose members shared a lot of interests
that you didn't. Two articles of PM's faith
seemed to be salvation through psychotherapy and damnation
through a frivolous approach to amusements.
Roger
Starr commented
that
Ingersoll,
as he would explain to anyone who would listen, wanted
to create a newspaper that would be free of all the
clichés newspapers had embodied for several centuries.
He would show that to be serious, a newspaper did not
have to be solemn. Nor did it have to be an ungainly
mass of large folded sheets of unbound paper that made
reading it impossible while standing in a subway train
and that separated family members when read at the breakfast
table.
Instead of reporters who were simply trained to cast
the main facts of a story in the first paragraph, Ingersoll
wanted writers who could tell a story dramatically.
And unlike the standard news story that aspired to a
neutral tone, PM's stories would make it clear
where the writer's sympathies lay. Moreover, Ingersoll
would give space to writers with whom he did not agree,
as long as they came to their position honorably. Lest
a single reader feel that advertisers' money was influencing
PM's choice of news coverage and tinting its
editorial policies, the newspaper would carry no advertising.
Countless conferences preceded the paper's final format.
It was smaller and squarer than the News and
Mirror tabloids already on the street, its
32 pages stapled together along the spine to make it
easier to handle. PM relied more heavily on
photographs than existing papers—its initials
stood for "photographic material" as well
as for its afternoon appearance on newsstands. And its
new format, which separated the news into different
departments, made it easy for readers to find the news
they cared about.
The front page used color and featured only one story.
The PM logo appeared in the top left hand corner;
headlines of two or three relatively minor stories might
appear beneath it, but the rest of the page—at
least three-quarters of it—remained available
for the big story. Sometimes the front page was given
over to an editorial—though these did not appear
in every issue, and no more than one appeared in any
issue. Signed by Ralph Ingersoll and addressed to the
reader, PM's editorials made no attempt at
achieving a judicious tone: "The Fascists Are Winning,"
declared one of PM's front pages. "What
Are You Going to Do About It?"
PM
was defiantly to the Left in an otherwise largely conservative
publishing milieu and, more remarkably, aimed to operate
as a mass-circulation daily based on sales rather than
advertising. That model seems to have been flawed and
the paper expired in 1948 despite substantial support
from retail heir Marshall Field
III (1893-1956), who had launched the liberal daily
Chicago Sun in 1941 and went on to found the
Chicago Sun-Times
in 1948.
Launch of PM had been facilitated by US$100,000
from playboy Huntington Hartford (1911-2008), whose stint
as a reporter is now remembered for his explanation that
he had missed a deadline on a story in Long Island because
on returned to the city in his yacht he could find nowhere
to moor it.
Ingersoll was subsequently active as a journalist and
late in life built a minor newspaper chain while simultaneously
providing management services for Goodson
Newspaper Group.
His son Ralph Ingersoll II, with a little help from friends
such as Michael Milken, used junk bonds to build a newspaper
group that embraced major US states, Eire and the UK.
It included 38 dailies and 159 weeklies, with critics
dubbing him the "Colonel Sanders of tabloids".
The group collapsed in the early 1990s, with Warburg Pincus
taking over the US operations, Ingersoll's UK papers going
in a management buyout and the Eire partnership dissolving
in expensive litigation.
Ingersoll's US backers proceeded to buy additional papers
and slash costs before a successful IPO of the Journal
Register Company in 1997. In 1998 Journal Register acquired
25 titles from Goodson Newspapers.
The group now includes 23 daily and 236 non-daily newspapers
in the US, with substantial sharing of content and rigorous
attention to costs on the model of the 'McPaper' chains
such as Gannett, CNHI,
MediaGeneral, Metro
or MediaNews.
In November 2004 Journal Register announced that it was
paying US$415 million for 21st Century Newspapers Inc,
owner of four daily newspapers in Michigan (Daily
Oakland Press, Macomb Daily, Royal Oak Daily
Tribune and Mount Pleasant Morning Sun)
and 87 non-daily publications. The dailies had a combined
daily circulation of about 137,500, with a Sunday circulation
of 176,000. The 87 non-daily publications have combined
distribution of about 1.5 million.
In April 2008 Journal Register was delisted by the New
York Stock Exchange after its shares slumped below the
critical US$1 mark to a mere 32 cents. The decline reflected
the group's debt of US$625 million at the end of 2007
(attributed to the Michigan acquisition, which soured
with ongoing cutbacks in advertising in Detroit) and reports
that reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation
and amortization were expected to be US$70 million in
2008 (down from US$90 million in 2007).
studies
There has been no major general study of Journal Register.
For Ingersoll Sr see Roy Hoopes' Ralph Ingersoll:
A Biography (New York: Atheneum 1985) and works on
the early history of Time,
Life and the New
Yorker.
PM is examined in detail in Paul Milkman's PM:
A New Deal in Journalism, 1940-1948 (New Brunswick:
Rutgers Uni Press 1997). Marshall Field III is considered
in 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). Other pointers are provided here
as part of discussion of Field Enterprises. Crusading
lawyer Bartley Crum, who attempted to keep PM
afloat, is Crum is profiled in Anything Your Little
Heart Desires: An American Family Story (New York:
Simon & Schuster 1997), a memoir by daughter Patricia
Bosworth. For the spoilt and erratic Hartford see Squandered
Fortune: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford
(New York: Putnam 1991) by Lisa Guber.
For the Irish Press debacle see De Valera, Fianna
Fáil, and the Irish Press: the Truth in the News?
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2002) by Mark O'Brien,
Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922 (London:
Routledge 2001) by John Horgan and the court decision
in Irish Press Public Limited Company v Ingersoll
Irish Publications.
Ingersoll Jr is profiled in Paper Tigers (London:
Heinemann 1993) by Nicholas Coleridge and features in
works on junk bond giddiness such as Connie Bruck's The
Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham &
the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders (New York: Penguin
1989) and Den of Thieves (New York: Touchstone
1991) by James Stewart.
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