Four Top Execs Quit San Francisco Newspaper Agency

In a continuing shake-up at the top of San Francisco’s troubled newspaper business, four officers of the agency that oversees business operations for the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner resigned en masse Friday.

Leaving the San Francisco Newspaper Agency are Robert McCormick, who was president and chief executive; Thomas Clancy, executive vice president of sales and marketing; Lawrence Ingram, senior vice president of operations, and John Raytis, vice president of circulation.

“This is a big change and certainly came as a big surprise to all of the people who work at the San Francisco Newspaper Agency,” Alice Hodge, vice president of marketing at the agency, told the Associated Press.

However, the removal of McCormick and other top agency officials had been the subject of speculation given a series of dramatic, high-level changes at Chronicle Publishing Co. in recent months. On April 7, the company--which publishes the city’s dominant paper, the Chronicle--installed the first outsider as president and chief executive in its 128-year history as a family-owned media empire.

He is John B. Sias, 66, a highly regarded former executive vice president of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. and president of the ABC television network.

Sias succeeded Richard T. Thieriot, 51, as chief executive. Thieriot--a great-grandchild of wealthy San Franciscan Michael H. de Young, the Chronicle’s founder--left the post in October after 17 years.

The San Francisco Newspaper Agency was created to oversee newspaper advertising and operations as part of a 1965 joint operating agreement between the Chronicle and the Examiner, which is published by Hearst Corp. The JOA, originally set to expire in 1995, was extended through September, 2005. The newspapers’ editorial staffs remained separate.