Neuharth Will Step Down as Gannett’s Chief

Allen H. Neuharth surprised Tuesday’s annual meeting of Gannett shareholders by announcing that he will step down as chief executive of the giant media company in favor of President John J. Curley, 47.

Neuharth, 62, will stay on as chairman of Arlington, Va.-based Gannett, publisher of USA Today and 92 other daily newspapers with a combined circulation exceeding 6 million.

Neuharth, who is credited with building Gannett into the nation’s largest newspaper chain, chose to bury his revelation near the end of his report to shareholders gathered in Washington--a report that chronicled what he called Gannett’s “best ever” year.

“The time has come to take another step in the planned and orderly transition of Gannett’s leadership to the next generation,” Neuharth said in announcing his intention to recommend that the directors retain him as “your chairman, period,” and name Curley as chief executive.

Meeting immediately after the shareholder session, the board quickly obliged Neuharth. The board also accepted the retirement of directors Howard H. Baker Jr. and Edward P. Bassett.

Until his contract runs out when he turns 65 in March, 1989, Neuharth said he intends to concentrate on “long-term policy and planning, especially in the area of acquisitions, mergers, new ventures and other such major Gannett matters.”

Acquisitions have figured prominently in his 13 years as chief executive--a period that saw 40 papers added to Gannett’s roster. On Monday, Gannett announced its agreement to buy the venerable Louisville Courier-Journal and Times newspapers in Kentucky for about $300 million, the most recent of a series of blockbuster media purchases over the last 18 months.

Already the nation’s largest newspaper group, Gannett spent $717 million to buy the Evening News Assn., which publishes the Detroit News and four other newspapers and operates two television stations, and another $200 million in acquiring the Des Moines Register & Tribune Co., whose holdings include the Des Moines Register. Last year, the company bought the newspaper supplement Family Weekly, converting it to USA Weekend; expanded its already huge billboard business through purchase of Triangle Sign Co., and picked up a radio station serving the lucrative Dallas-Fort Worth market.

Career Began With Modest Failure

Over the same 13-year period of rapid growth, Gannett’s annual earnings climbed to $253.3 million on $2.21 billion in revenue last year from $23 million on revenue of $288 million. In the first quarter of this year, the company reported its 74th straight gain in quarterly earnings.

Ironically, Neuharth’s publishing career began with a modest failure in 1954, when he was forced to shut down a sports magazine that he began in his native South Dakota. He rented a trailer and headed for Florida--”the furthest I could go without leaving the country,” he once told an interviewer.

It turned out to be the first of a series of moves through news executive posts at the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press and the Times-Union and Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., before joining Gannett as executive vice president in 1963. He became president in 1970, chief executive in 1973 and chairman in 1979.

Curley, Neuharth’s successor as chief executive, has a similar news background, beginning as a reporter in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before joining Gannett in 1969 as suburban editor of Gannett’s recently acquired Times-Union in Rochester, then the chain’s largest paper. In 1974, he began a six-year tour as head of Gannett News Service in Washington, culminating in the winning of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service--the only time a wire service has won the prestigious award.

Curley later headed Gannett’s Middle Atlantic newspaper group, was editor at the 1982 launching of USA Today, became president of Gannett’s newspaper division the next year and was named president and chief operating officer the next year.