|
overview
holdings
landmarks
|
overview
This
page looks at the Pulitzer media group - the US newspaper
chain founded by one of the pioneers of 'yellow journalism'
- and Lee Enterprises, whose US$1.46 billion acquisition
of Pulitzer was announced in February 2005.
It covers -
introduction
Acquisition of Pulitzer Inc. in 2005 made Lee the fourth
largest newspaper publisher in the US in terms of dailies
(with 58 titles) and seventh largest in terms of aggregate
daily circulation. The group encompasses over 300 weekly
newspapers, shoppers and specialty publications. It has
around 10,700 employees.
Hungarian emigrant Joseph Pulitzer made a fortune peddling
the 1890s version of trash tv in the US. Suffering from
depression, physical ailments (real or otherwise) and
recurrent paranoia he became a Howard Hughes-style recluse
who spent the final decades of his life in what he referred
to as soundproof "vaults" on his yacht, the 'Tower of
Silence' at Bar Harbor in Maine and a sumptuous brownstone
in Manhattan.
The next generation of Pulitzers, perhaps unsurprisingly,
seem to have been burdened with psychological baggage
and retreated into mediocrity.
By 2000 the group was now largely run by managers from
outside the family and concentrated on US newspapers after
selling its broadcasting holdings to Hearst,
founded by Joseph's great rival, in the late 1990s for
US$1.15 billion. In 1996 it bought the Scripps
League newspapers (separated in 1921 from what later
became Scripps-Howard) for US$216 million. In November
2004 the group announced that it was for sale. Joseph
Pulitzer's descendants at that time had voting control
of the group through a class of super-voting stock restricted
to family members.
In 2005 Lee Enterprises Inc. announced that had acquired
Pulitzer Inc.'s newspaper holdings (including the St
Louis Post-Dispatch) in a US$1.46 billion deal that
creates the US's fourth-largest newspaper publisher by
number of US daily newspapers and seventh in circulation
(with 58 daily newspapers in 23 states, a circulation
of 1.7 million daily and 2 million on Sundays).
The Pulitzer corporate site is here.
the group
Like Scripps, the Pulitzer group
at the time of the merger was still controlled by the
founder's family but was considerably smaller, in contrast
to that of Hearst.
The major assets are the St Louis Post-Dispatch
and Arizona Daily Star; other holdings
involve minor provincial newspapers. The group's broadcast
assets were acquired by Hearst
for around US$2 billion in 1999.
An indication of holdings is here.
history
Founder Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) migrated to the US
from rural Hungary in 1864, serving in the Civil War before
settling in Missouri, where in 1868 he began working for
the St Louis German-language daily Westliche Post.
He was elected to the Missouri State Assembly for the
Republican Party in 1869 and three years later Pulitzer
acquired the Post for US$3,000. In 1878 he purchased
the St Louis Dispatch for US$2,700, merging the
two titles as the St Louis Post & Dispatch
(now the Post-Dispatch) and ramping up circulation
with a populism embellished with statements such as
it will always fight for progress and reform, never
tolerate injustice or corruption , always fight demagogues
of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose
privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack
sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the
public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing
news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid
to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or
predatory poverty
In
1883 he relieved railway and telegraph czar Jay Gould
of the ailing daily New York World (founded 1880)
at a cost of US$346,000. He proclaimed that
There
is room in this great and growing city for a journal
that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but
large, not only large but truly democratic - dedicated
to the cause of the people rather than that of purse
potentates - devoted more to the news of the New than
the Old World; that will expose all fraud and sham;
fight all public evils and abuses; that will serve and
battle for the people with earnest sincerity.
Pulitzer
took the World downmarket with a relentless diet
of sensationalism. As with contemporary trash tv the recipe
was commercially successful: circulation climbed from
15,000 to 600,000 by 1887, making it the largest newspaper
in the US.
Pulitzer was elected to the US House of Representatives
in 1885 but by 1890 was showing signs of overwork, with
deteriorating eyesight and disagreement about his sanity
and treatment of employees. He resigned his editorship,
maintaining control from a distance in the New York 'newspaper
wars' of that decade, notably competition with the New
York Journal after that title was acquired by
William Randolph Hearst in 1895.
Ironically the Journal had been founded and then
sold by Joseph's brother Albert. His "crusade"
against Mary Baker Eddy in 1907 resulted in the latter's
establishment of the CS Monitor.
Pulitzer died aboard his yacht in 1911, leaving Columbia
University some US$2 million in his will for a Graduate
School of Journalism. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded
in 1917. Supposed affinity for "the common man"
was not reflected in his lifestyle, with his New York
Times obituary sniffing that
Mr.
Pulitzer had one of the most expensive households in
America. He had a home in East Seventy-third Street,
a fine estate at Bar Harbor, and another country place
on Jekyl Island, off the Georgia coast. Also he usually
had two or three places abroad under lease, and a 1,500-ton
steam yacht that added $100,000 a year to his expenditures
Heir
Ralph Pulitzer (1879–1939) gained control of the
World, which was acquired by Scripps-Howard
for US$5 million in 1931 and became the World-Telegram.
Joseph Pulitzer II (1885-1955) retained the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
Lee Enterprises
[under development]
studies
For Joseph Pulitzer, now remembered primarily for the
Pulitzer
Prizes, the most entertaining account is William Swanberg's
W.A. Pulitzer (New York: Scribner's 1967). It is
unlikely to be fully superseded by Denis Brian's more
stolid Joseph Pulitzer: A Life (New York: Wiley
2001).
Standard academic studies are George Juergens' Joseph
Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton: Princeton
Uni Press 1966) and Julian Rammelkamp's Pulitzer's
Post-Dispatch: 1878-1883 (Princeton: Princeton Uni
Press 1967). Paul Weaver's News & the Culture of
Lying (New York: Free Press 1994) and W. Joseph Campbell's
Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining
the Legacies (Westport: Praeger 2001) have more bite.
There are thinner accounts in Piers Brendon's The Life
& Death of the Press Barons (London: Secker & Warburg
1982) and Wilbur Granberg's The World of Joseph Pulitzer
(London: Abelard-Schuman 1965). Nicholson Baker &
Margaret Brentano edited The World on Sunday: Graphic
Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898-1911) (New
York: Bulfinch 2005)
For later generations, see Daniel Pfaff's Joseph Pulitzer
II & the Post-Dispatch (University Park: Penn
State Press 1991).
Pulizer's 1904 will left Columbia University a $2 million
endowment for a journalism school and prizes for literature,
journalism, music and drama. He indicated that
I
am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of
journalism, having spent my life in that profession,
regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled
importance for its influence upon the minds and morals
of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this
profession young men of character and ability, also
to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire
the highest moral and intellectual training.
The
Pulitzers have attained something of the status of Hollywood's
Oscars, with similar complaints about cronyism and opaque
criteria. Alexander Cockburn sniffed in the Wall Street
Journal during 1984 that the Pulitzers are "a
self-validating ritual whereby journalists give each other
prizes and then boast to the public about them",
going on to comment that
If
bankers gave themselves prizes ('the most reckless Third-World
loan of the year') with the same abandon as journalists,
you may be sure that the public ridicule would soon
force them to conduct the proceedings in secret.
Print journalism is, however, a different country - they
do things differently there.
For the history of the prizes and their impact see John
Hohenberg's reverential The Pulitzer Prizes; a History
of the Awards in Books, Drama, Music, and Journalism,
Based on the Private Files over Six Decades (New York:
Columbia Uni Press 1974) and The Pulitzer Prize Story
II: award-winning news stories, columns, editorials, cartoons,
and news pictures (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1980).
There has been no major study of Lee Enterprises or Howard.
Two works John Newhouse's reverential Philip D. Adler:
A Man and a Tradition (Mount Vernon: Lee Enterprises
1970) and Wilbur Cross' Lee's Legacy of Leadership:
The History of Lee Enterprises, Incorporated (Davenport:
Greenwich Publishing 1990).
next
page (Pulitzer holdings)
|
|
