James Rosse, 72; Ex-Provost of Stanford, 1st Outsider to Head Parent Firm of O.C. Register

James N. Rosse, former provost of Stanford University and retired president and chief executive of Freedom Communications Inc., died Monday after a long illness. He was 72.

In 1992, Rosse became the first outsider to lead Irvine-based Freedom, the parent company of the Orange County Register. Until then, Freedom’s top executive had always been either a member of the extended family that owns the company or a person who had worked his way up through Freedom’s ranks.

Rosse served as Freedom’s chief executive for seven years, guiding the company through a period of diversification, including significant growth in its newspaper and broadcast divisions. He also was credited with adding non-family members to Freedom’s board of directors and modernizing business operations.

Rosse understood the challenge he faced when he left academia to join the company founded by R.C. Hoiles and built on a libertarian philosophy and family loyalty.

“It’s difficult for someone to come from outside a company into one that has a strong family control as this one and learn to deal with that, make use of it, and gain the confidence of the owners,” Rosse told the Los Angeles Business Journal in 1999 after he announced his retirement.

Alan J. Bell, Freedom’s current president and chief executive, said Rosse’s experience as the top administrative officer of Stanford -- and having to deal with the various constituencies of a university campus -- helped him negotiate the family factions within Freedom.

“His expertise was in media economics,” Bell said. “This was a chance for him to put into practice what he had taught.... He pushed expansion, he pushed technology, and he pushed innovation.”

But Rosse’s money-losing move into magazines exacerbated long-simmering family feuds within Freedom, Bell said.

Those feuds eventually led to a deal last year that will allow an outside investor for the first time to buy out family members.

“It would have happened anyway,” Bell said. “But this accelerated it, no doubt about it.”

A farm boy from Sidney, Neb., Rosse attended Yale University and graduated from the University of Minnesota with a doctorate in economics and math.

He worked at Stanford for 26 years, first as an economics professor and later as an associate dean of humanities and sciences and director of the Center for Economic Policy Research. He became provost in 1984.

Rosse lived in Irvine. He is survived by his wife, Jan, three children and three grandchildren. Services are pending.