Publisher Page Is Big News for Small Papers : Newspapers: Publisher Robert E. Page has been on top in the news business. He isn’t lowering his expectations for his new acquisitions, the Orange Coast Daily Pilot and Glendale News Press.

Sitting in the newspaper-strewn office that serves as headquarters for his new publishing company, Robert E. Page jabs his finger at a recent issue of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot, pointing out a bad picture here, a poorly designed front-page “teaser” there.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he groans, shaking his head at the editorial flaws in the newspaper he recently bought.

Despite the elegant suit and the natty purple tie, the plain-spoken Page has none of the pretentions of a media mogul as he chats expansively about the future of the Pilot and his other recent acquisition, the Glendale News Press. And the modest, two-story Pilot building in Costa Mesa that serves as his base would never be mistaken for the nerve center of a newspaper empire.

There are no stretch limousines here, as there were back in Chicago, where until August, 1988, Page was publisher, president and part-owner of the Chicago Sun-Times. No big-budget advertising campaigns to promote the paper and spread the publisher’s name around town. No stable of well-known columnists and editors and high-priced managers.

The talented and controversial Page nonetheless professes to be as enthusiastic about the Pilot and the News Press as he ever was about the Sun-Times. The two papers and their free-distribution affiliates--the weekly Independents in Orange County and the twice-weekly Leaders near Glendale--are just the beginning, says Page, the foundation for a much larger Southern California newspaper group.

“These are only the first of many we plan to acquire,” Page declares.

Elliot Stein Jr., chairman of Page Group Publishing and Commonwealth Capital Partners, the small New York investment firm that put up most of the nearly $20 million it took to buy the two papers, adds: “These papers are small, but they have very focused, high-demographic audiences.”

Maybe so. But people familiar with the local newspaper market consider the Pilot and the News Press to be weak properties that are too far apart to complement one another effectively. Both are struggling to find a niche as papers which provide more community news than The Times and the two big suburban dailies--the Orange County Register and the Daily News of Los Angeles--but are more serious and informative than the ubiquitous suburban weeklies.

Page’s challenge, moreover, is in some ways more personal than putting two small daily newspapers back on track. His career, by most measures, has been a smashing success: No. 2 man at United Press International at 39, publisher of the Boston Herald at 47, part owner and president of the Chicago Sun-Times at 50. His years in the business have earned him an army of admirers who praise his charm, his energy and his excellent marketing instincts.

But the Sun-Times adventure ended somewhat ignominiously for Page when he was forced to resign after a falling out with his financial backers. Even some of his fans admit he can be volatile, egotistical and ruthless toward people who aren’t part of his personal team. And friends say he’s unlikely to be satisfied running a couple of small dailies.

Bob Page, in short, may yet have something to prove. And he’ll have his hands full proving it in Costa Mesa.

Still, nothing in Page’s buoyant demeanor suggests anything but untrammeled optimism about his new acquisitions. “We’re sitting in a tremendous market here that we haven’t even begun to tap,” Page says over lunch at the exclusive Balboa Bay Club, the sort of tony establishment the dapper publisher has long been known to favor. The million-dollar yachts bobbing outside underscore his point that Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Glendale are affluent communities with fast-growing local business centers. “Our goal is to drive circulation and advertising far above what it is today.”

The long declines of both papers, he says, stem in large measure from the fact that they were owned by large newspaper groups that “had other priorities.” Experts on the community newspaper market in Southern California, though, think there are other reasons. “Would you want to go up against (Daily News publisher) Jack Kent Cooke and the Register?” one of the experts asks, noting that Page’s adopted communities are served by both strong suburban papers and The Times.

But Page believes that local ownership and hands-on management--along with the efficiencies that could come from owning a regional chain of papers--will enable him to be more successful than previous owners. He’s solved the local-ownership part by moving to Newport Beach. Part of his motivation for buying papers here, in fact, was a longstanding desire to live in Southern California.

Acquiring new properties may be more difficult. In Southern California and elsewhere in the country, many newspaper editors and publishers have sought to tap booming suburban markets by buying up both small daily newspapers and community weeklies. With a cluster of papers, costs can be reduced by combining administrative and production functions.

Copley Newspapers has pursued just such a strategy with its papers in Santa Monica, Torrance and San Pedro, and large newspaper chains and entrepreneurs around the country are increasingly on the lookout for neighboring newspapers or even entire suburban groups.

One result of that trend is that competition for good properties is fierce. Page lost out in the bidding for a group 30 weeklies in Los Angeles and Orange counties that Media General Inc. has agreed to sell to Freedom Newspapers, parent company of the Register. And he backed out of a deal to buy a group of weeklies in northern San Diego County when a close look showed them to be in terrible financial condition.

Moreover, Page’s backers at Commonwealth are apparently skittish about spending too much more money until performance improves at the papers he has already. Sources say Page just last week backed out of a deal to buy a national trade publication. Page acknowledges that one transaction has been “delayed,” but says other negotiations are continuing.

Page downplays the importance of further purchases: “The key is to be successful--that’s more important than being big.” But success might require size, especially for a man who so recently ran one of the nation’s largest newspapers.

A Big-Picture Man

Through 30-odd years in the newspaper industry, Bob Page has gained a reputation as an energetic, almost charismatic executive, a big-picture man with a gift for promotion who enjoys the editorial side of the operations and despises the gritty detail of finance. That approach has played better in some places than others.

At United Press International, where he started his career as a reporter, it worked. Page remains extremely popular with the legion of former UPI writers, who say he consistently went to bat for them on issues such as pay raises during his tenure as a wire service executive.

“He was a very popular and effective executive,” said Doug Gripp, a one-time UPI executive and now a newspaper consultant. “People liked to be associated with him.”

After serving in London, Hong Kong and other locations, Page became general manager of UPI in 1975, and admits that he wanted the job of president. But Page said that when E. W. Scripps, then the owner of UPI, failed in its effort to persuade 45 other newspaper companies to buy partnerships in UPI in 1980, it became clear to him that the wire service would be sold and his time there was up.

“Had I known what I know now, I would have tried to put together a leveraged buyout” of UPI, Page laments. But his job prospects were bright: He knew virtually every important newspaper publisher in the country, because they were his clients at UPI. He took a job with the Hearst Corp., learning the ins and outs of circulation and advertising as the second in command at the San Antonio Light. After a transition period, he was to become publisher.

That arrangement didn’t work out, however, for reasons that Page declines to discuss. He quit and was quickly snapped up by the competing San Antonio Express-News, owned by Australian-born press baron Rupert Murdoch. Soon, Page was working at Murdoch’s U.S headquarters in New York. When Murdoch bought the struggling Boston Herald in 1982, Page was tapped for the top job.

Donald D. Kummerfeld, former president of Murdoch’s U.S. publishing operations, called Page “one of the best representatives that a newspaper group could have in a community.” Some of the tactics used to revive the Herald--such as the notorious Wingo lottery game--were vintage Murdoch, but Page made his own imprint as well. He tirelessly courted advertisers, bought computers for the newsroom, got involved in a number of civic organizations and worked to rename the street in front of the newspaper Herald Square.

Perhaps even more important, he infused a sense of spirit into what had been a moribund organization. “He’s a wonderful leader, very good at coming in and bringing people onto his team,” said James P. Dolan, a longtime associate of Page and now managing director of the Jordan Group, a New York media consulting firm.

Circulation at the Herald rose from about 200,000 to well over 300,000 under Page, and the paper was soon turning a profit. Page himself became a well-known figure around town, his visibility further enhanced by his marriage to local television personality Nancy Merrill.

“He was very decisive and made things happen,” said Peter Lucas, a political columnist at the Herald.

Page’s job in Boston was made easier by the fact that Murdoch’s purchase of the paper prevented it from folding, and therefore local resentment of the media mogul’s sensationalist editorial approach was muted.

He didn’t have that advantage in 1984, when Murdoch moved him to Chicago to be publisher of the newly acquired Sun-Times. Instead, Page was greeted with an exodus of editorial staff and anxiety in the community, and he was never able to eradicate anti-Murdoch sentiment in the newsroom.

Still, his spirited style won him some admirers. He wooed advertisers and employees with seats at Chicago Bears games, even chartering a plane to bring clients to the 1986 Super Bowl. He again assumed a high profile in the community, frequenting the best restaurants, sponsoring art exhibits and rubbing elbows with local lions.

But not everybody was included in the party. “Bob has a tribal way of managing people,” Dolan said. “If you’re in his tribe, it’s great. But if you’re not, if you don’t get invited to the Bears games, it can breed resentment.”

Another one-time associate says there are two Bob Pages: one good-natured and charming, the other ruthless, the kind of person who could “fire someone with 40 years on the job and make him get out the same day.”

In 1986, Murdoch was forced to sell the Sun-Times when he purchased a Chicago television station, and Page put together a team of investors who bought the paper in a $145-million leveraged buyout. Page was president and publisher, but lurking in the background was the New York investment firm of Adler & Shaykin.

Things went swimmingly at first. Page hired Matthew Storin as editor in an effort to “de-Murdochize” the editorial content of the paper, and the Sun-Times reportedly made a profit of $20 million in its first year under the new owners. But the results were not so good in the second year, and the competing Chicago Tribune caught the Sun-Times flat-footed when it began buying up the home-delivery agencies which served both papers.

As the Sun-Times’ circulation slumped, Murdoch-style promotions began to reappear. Storin, who describes Page as “impetuous in a creative sort of way,” said the publisher began to “dictate rather than discuss things,” leading Storin to resign. Sources said a virtual war broke out between Page and Sun-Times chief financial officer Donald Piazza. Soon, Shaykin was flying in every week to look over Page’s shoulder. And Page’s high-living style came back to haunt him.

“You can’t go out to the fancy restaurants and have the limousine waiting outside, and then come back and announce 10% staff cuts and tell people they can’t buy paper clips,” quipped one former employee. As the resentment mounted, Page found himself increasingly isolated, and in August, 1988, his partners bought out his stake and he resigned.

Page bristles at the suggestion that his departure had anything to do with financial problems. “It didn’t work out because we couldn’t get along,” is all he will say. But the episode clearly rankles, with Page’s warm voice assuming a tight, bitter edge as soon as the subject is raised. He’s consoled only by the several million dollars that he and his wife reportedly made on the deal.

‘Not an Accountant’

On the phone in his Costa Mesa office with a man selling newsprint, Page chats briefly about dollars-per-ton and roll widths before passing the call to Gerald W. Adcox, a young Floridian who serves as treasurer of Page Group Publishing. Page doesn’t deny that his strengths as a publisher are not in production and certainly not in finance. “I’m not an accountant,” he says disdainfully, and he enjoys chiding Adcox about the tedium of numbers.

Page doesn’t hesitate to delegate authority, according to associates, as long as the results are good. Richard S. Newcombe, now president of Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and once the head of a syndicate owned by the Sun-Times, said Page “basically left me alone to run the syndicate, and I really appreciated that.”

Newcombe also gives him credit for being truly committed to newspapers, a sentiment echoed by others. “He was a close reader not only of his paper, but of others,” said Storin, “He was very supportive on editorial. He has good journalistic instincts.”

Page will need all his instincts--and all the competent colleagues he can muster--to turn his new acquisitions around. Page hopes that circulation--now about 18,000 at the Pilot and 10,000 at the News Press--can be doubled in both places. He has no magic formula, but states emphatically that editorial quality is the first priority: “We have to be slavish in our devotion to local news in these communities.”

Once the “product” is up to speed, Page will be ready to pull out the stops. He’s hired an advertising agency, which he declined to identify, and he plans to launch promotion campaigns for both publications. Important advertisers such as shopping malls and car dealers will be wooed with special sections and “total market coverage,” which the papers can provide via their free-distribution sister papers, the four weekly Independents in Orange County and the two twice-weekly Leaders near Glendale.

The News Press, Page says, has already begun to turn the corner under publisher Judee Kendall, who is staying on. Sources say the Glendale paper is profitable, and it apparently cost Page nearly double the $7 million he reportedly paid for the larger but money-losing Pilot.

Page rejects the notion that the communities served by the Pilot--Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Irvine and Laguna Beach--are now given adequate coverage by the Register and Times.

“The Register isn’t a community newspaper anymore--it’s up there now in the big leagues with The Times,” he says. Similarly, he adds, the Daily News, which took dead aim at the News Press several years ago with its Glendale “wrap-around” pages, is really a metropolitan paper now.

Kirk Cheyfitz, head of the publishing division of Adams Communications, which had owned the Pilot, said Page will benefit from having both papers. Adams, too, was trying to buy the News Press, Cheyfitz said, but was “outmaneuvered” by Page, and, having lost the chance to gain some economies of scale, decided to sell the Pilot.

Adams, Cheyfitz said, has achieved cost savings of about 10% by centralizing most of the operations of two dailies and a dozen weeklies it owns in a Detroit suburb. He said Page should be able to do something similar.

Already, administrative functions at the Pilot and the News Press are being combined, but Page is still evaluating which other operations--such as composing and printing--can be centralized. The Pilot has large, modern and under-utilized color printing presses, and Page would dearly love to have something else to print there. But Costa Mesa may prove to be too many traffic-clogged miles from Glendale for that to be an option.

Critics, who refused to speak on the record, said it will simply be impossible for the two small dailies to find a niche in the market. Many newspapers in the Los Angeles area have expired over the past two decades as the metropolitan area and its big newspapers have swallowed up the outlying towns, and free community weeklies now provide the highly local news that readers still want.

Page, an optimist by nature, is undaunted. Success, he said, will not require either expanding or contracting the market areas of the paper, nor does he intend to spend money by starting up papers in neighboring towns or radically changing the formats. The papers have a “reservoir of good will” in their communities that’s just waiting to be tapped, Page says, and he’s striving for the right editorial formula to tap it.

Among the many newspapers in Page’s office is a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. There’s also a copy of the Gwinnett Daily News, a small newspaper in suburban Atlanta that’s often cited as a prototype of the successful “ex-urban” daily. The Sun-Times, Page remarks, is “still my paper, until (new editor Dennis) Britton changes it.” But Bob Page is in community journalism now, and if he’s looking for models he won’t be looking to Chicago, but to Gwinnett.

DAILY PILOT AND GLENDALE NEWS PRESS CIRCULATIONS

Circulation numbers are for evening editions: 1985-1988 have been independently audited; 1989 is an estimate based on Los Angeles Times market research.

ORANGE COAST DAILY PILOT SEP.85: 32,062 MAR.86: 30,404 SEP.87: 22,213 SEP.88: 20,157 MAR.89: 18,176

GLENDALE NEWS PRESS SEP.85: 9,112 MAR.86: 9,024 SEP.87: 7,785 SEP.88: 7,741 MAR.89: 7,158

Source: Editor & Publisher Yearbook, Los Angeles Times market research

ORANGE COAST DAILY PILOT * Founded: 1907

* Employees: 120

* Sister publications:

Huntington Beach Independent

Fountain Valley Independent

Newport Beach Independent

Costa Mesa Independent

GLENDALE NEWS PRESS * Founded: 1905 * Employees: 110 * Sister publications:

Foothill Leader

Burbank Leader

ROBERT E. PAGE Title: President and chief executive Firm: Page Publishing Group Inc. Age: 54 Residence: Newport Beach Background:

President, publisher, and minority owner, Chicago Sun-Times

Publisher, Boston Herald

General Manager, United Press International Business philosophy: “The key is to be successful--that’s more important than being big.” Editorial philosophy: “We have to be slavish in our devotion to local news in these communities.”