KNIGHT RIDDER HUNS SACK STERN STABLES: Inquirer Owners Pay Estimated $1.5 Million For Neighborhood Nags, 70 Years of Newspapers

by INDEPENDENT STAFF June 2004 N. LIBERTIES, Phila.—Until last month, when he unceremoniously sold the Fishtown Star and its six other Star Publications to media behemoth Knight Ridder Inc., Jonathan Stern was a newspaperman, like his father had been. Well, that's one way of putting it. It is not, to be sure, the way Jonathan's 90-year-old sister Jill put it: “Jonathan wasn't in the newspaper business,” insists Jill Stern Capron, who at one time also published a weekly newspaper, Maryland's Hartford Gazette. “That's not the newspaper business. That's something else. Those weren't newspapers.” One of the final issues of the Fishtown Star under Jonathan Stern, dated April 28, boasts a picture of powerful state Sen. Vince Fumo on its cover. Granted, you cannot really make out Fumo, because he is obscured by the backsides of the dozen or so members of the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association who showed up to hear him speak, and his head is, besides being about the size of a grain of rice, out of focus. Inside, a column called “City Sojourn” contains an interview with retired schoolteacher Meg Packer, a cousin of the late East Falls-bred actress and princess Grace Kelly. There is also a page of birthday, graduation and first Holy Communion announcements, and a healthy selection of advertisements, which brought in about $2 million in revenue in 2002. When Stern sold his five Star and two Home News titles to Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (PNI), the wholly owned subsidiary of Knight Ridder Inc. which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Northeast Times among many, many others, the deal prompted the predictable range of comments from Stern's peers in the newspaper business: “It's always better when community newspapers are owned by a little guy,” from Philadelphia Weekly editor Tim Whitaker. “There's a tendency to look over your shoulder when you're run by a big media company.” “The average reader was never aware, never would have known there was a change in ownership,” from Frank Gusoff, managing editor of the Northeast Times, remembering what it was like when his paper was swallowed by PNI in 2001. “That's the most insidious thing about corporate ownership!” from Philadelphia City Paper founder Bruce Schimmel. “Just because you don't notice the intrusion of ownership doesn't mean the owner isn't shaping the news.” Though unlikely to gain the notice of any Pulitzer committees, the Star and its sisters were indeed newspapers. But they were perhaps something less than the kind of newspaper on which Jonathan and Jill were raised. The newspaperman with whom they grew up, their father Julius David Stern, was a feisty rebel. Discontented with his status as stenographer of the first rough draft of history, J. David Stern wanted to make it. His book Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher lists plenty of times he came close. There was the time, recounted on page 190, when he, as publisher of the Philadelphia Record, got together with a newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt and laid the foundation for the New Deal. “What would President Stern do first?” FDR asked, a little patronizingly, to which Stern suggested, in utter defiance of the conventional economic wisdom of the time, inviting the economist John Maynard Keynes to the White House. The president did not seek out Keynes until a year later.“If he had taken my advice a year ago,” Stern lamented, “He would have saved time and billions in licking the depression.” There was the time in 1933, recounted on page 214, when he went against the practice of every publisher in New York and joined prominent anti-Nazi lawyer Sam Untermeyer's boycott of German goods by printing, in his Philadelphia Record, Untermeyer's screed against Macy's, which continued to import German goods. “New York newspapers would not print a line of his attacks on their largest advertiser,” he wrote. “In December I bought the New York Post and found myself in the doghouse with New York's leading advertiser.” There was the time he published the National Record, a short-lived national weekly designed to push FDR's policies. With subscriptions pouring in from the Democratic National Committee, the National Record sold as many as 3,000,000 copies an issue, a higher circulation than any U.S. newspaper can claim today. And there was the time in 1941 when he, against the will of his own editorial board and against the grain of every single major newspaper at the time, warned the country not to make a lasting alliance with Stalin's Russia. This is on page 263. “There can be no united front for democracy with enemies of democracy,” he wrote in an editorial, because his editorial writers refused to draft it. When FDR returned from Yalta, he chided the President, “You gave old sourpuss [Stalin] everything but the kitchen stove.” There was also the time he persuaded Jack Kelly, handsome athlete, bricklayer-about-town and father of the to-be Princess Grace of Monaco—and uncle of the aforementioned schoolteacher Meg Packer—to lead Pennsylvania's fledgling Democratic Party. And then, sadly, there was the time Stern was forced to sell out. By 1947, the zealous New Deal liberal who prided himself on being one of the country's most union-friendly newspaper publishers could no longer meet the demands of the Philadelphia-Camden Newspaper Guild. He sold his holdings to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin for $12 million. Camden went another thirteen weeks before seeing the next Courier-Post, but the Record was never published again. THERE WAS ALSO the time Jonathan was born, in 1930, when J. David was 44 and his wife Juliet 43 years old. That occurs on page 140 of Memoirs, the only mention of the youngest of J. and Juliet's four children. By the time his younger brother was born, David “Tom” Stern III had graduated from Harvard University and was already showing promise as a newspaperman. When his father bought the New York Post in 1932, “Tom,” who was working at his father's Camden paper, the Courier, stepped in to run the Record in Philadelphia; he then moved north for a position as vice-president of the New York paper. During World War II, he served not only as a captain in the U.S. Army, he began work on the novel Francis, The Talking Mule, a book about an army mule whose sage advice to his inept lieutenant owner wins battles and astounds the military brass. The novel was made into a series of movies in the 1950s, and in the 1960s its director resurrected the premise for the TV show “Mr. Ed.” While David Stern III returned from the war to become a top executive at the Record, and, after his father sold the paper, an owner of the New Orleans Item, his younger brother turned out a bit more like the bumbling lieutenant Wilbur. “He had trouble holding down a job,” his sister Jill recalls. Jonathan Stern refused several times to comment for this story, even to explain the origins of the Star newspapers, but Jill Capron says that at some point during the 1970s, David “Tom” Stern, who died last year, “gave” Stern some “shoppers” to run, and those may have been the Star newspapers. “Jonathan is a good father,” Jill says, adding that her younger brother did not allow his work to consume his life. In an unlikely chain of events, Stern also came to publish an alternative weekly, the Distant Drummer, edited by a group of hippies who considered themselves every bit the mavericks J. David Stern had been. But the younger Stern had little use for radicalism or the “underground,” remembers Don DeMaio, the Drummer's onetime editor. “We were an underground newspaper, but Stern hated that,” he says. “He wanted us to pull in more readers. He also, from time to time, would push us to show more flesh.” That did not, however, include the flesh of homosexuals. For one issue, “We had dug up a photo of these two gay guys wearing thongs. We had it down on the page. He came to me, and he tore the whole page up in front of me and threw the pieces in my soup,” DeMaio recalls. “In those days, he wasn't really enlightened in terms of the gay movement.” But, “for the most part, we got along fine, and we kind of understood each other.” Today, DeMaio writes the official biographies of Rhode Island-area corporations. He has three children. The younger Stern may have shared his father's disregard for modern communications technology. “Nor has the marvelous acceleration of communications bolstered man's self-esteem,” the elder wrote. “In ancient times, located at the hub of the universe, he heard little of what went on outside his immediate neighborhood, and cared less. Now he is in instant touch with all the world. But the emphasis is on bad news, on his failures rather than achievements, on his weakness rather than his strength. Reading his newspaper he shudders at his iniquities, his stupidities, and his helplessness.” Until late 2003, Jonathan Stern's staff laid out every issue of every Star and Home News with scissors and paste before sending it off to the printer. The “News Star Inc.” banner hanging at the paper's office was produced on a dot-matrix printer. Once, the younger Stern tried to interest City Paper editor Bruce Schimmel in his typesetting services. “I told him, that's why God created Microsoft,” Schimmel remembers. Antiquated equipment and other imperfections did not bother Barbara Small, who had worked as an editorial assistant for Stern but was laid off after the sale. ”It was like having a friend every Wednesday, just to have it and go through it, and see a picture of somebody you knew,” she said. “Even if it wasn't always all that great, it was ours. It was from the neighborhood.” It is unclear what Jonathan Stern will do now. When his father sold his paper, he wrote Memoirs in what appears to have been a last attempt to warn the nation of the ills that would result from the American complacence he had spent his newspaper career fighting. “The creeping blight of monopoly has engulfed the American press,” he wrote in 1962. “Less than 10 percent of our dailies are competitive. One publisher rules the roost in 1,417 of the 1,485 cities where daily newspapers are published.” Knight Ridder has ruled Philadelphia's roost since 1982, when the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the newspaper which had bought out Stern's Record, folded. Today, the addition of seven small free neighborhood weeklies isn't likely to warrant a footnote on the Knight Ridder annual report. The conglomerate, which owns thirty-one daily newspapers including the Charlotte Observer and the Miami Herald, had purchased the Inquirer and the Daily News twelve years earlier. It is now the second largest newspaper conglomerate after Gannett, which owns USA Today and more than a hundred other daily newspapers. “Today's monopoly newspaper … serves a smooth mixture of many comic strips and syndicated features, with a minimum of wire stories and innocuous local news, as regularly and impersonally as other local monopolies supply gas.” This blandness, the elder Stern wrote, is the “saddest catastrophe.” Who is to blame for this sad state of affairs? Lack of adequate governmental regulation, for one. He even assailed the first term of his good friend FDR for this. But market forces also play a role. When he started his career, Stern wrote, “the man of the house chose his newspaper because of its editorials and news. But as advertising developed bulk and attractiveness it became the dominant circulation factor. Women want the most complete catalogue of bargains and latest fashions. Realizing this, merchants tend to concentrate news of their stores in one newspaper.” In Fishtown and Port Richmond, that newspaper was the Star chain—which is one of the reasons Knight Ridder decided to spend an estimated $1.5 million to buy it. “In this case it just made sense to acquire as opposed to expand,” said Ed McCartney, who negotiated the deal for Knight Ridder subsidiary Broad Street Community Newspapers. Also, “the fact that it is kind of contiguous geographically has made a lot of sense,” McCartney explained, referring to an industry trend that involves buying up many small publications in a geographic region that is called “clustering.” Jonathan Stern ended his tenure at the helm of the Star in a conference room at the newspaper's headquarters at 250 W. Girard Avenue. He called the staff together and told them their offices would be moving to Trevose, a half-hour's drive outside the city, where the Northeast Times and Knight Ridder's other Philadelphia community newspapers are located. He then left the building. Readers “hunger for bold, forceful newspapers,” J. David Stern wrote on the last page, 315, of his book. “I am confident their hunger will be satisfied before it is too late.” His son may have proved him wrong.