The Deal from Hell

The white tour bus carrying John Madigan weaved through the streets of Havana. Once again, he and an entourage of Tribune Company executives had come to Cuba with the hope of interviewing Fidel Castro, and once again, Castro had stiffed them. Eric Ober, president of CBS News, had recently shown up in Havana with a group of network executives for a long, late-night session with Castro. So had many other lesser corporate luminaries. But for the second time in six years, the dictator gave the cold shoulder to the CEO of the Tribune Company, head of a widely admired Fortune 500 corporation and a group of executives who ran newspapers covering the world’s largest diaspora of Cubans. As his bus passed bicycles and aging cars plying the frenetic streets of Havana, Madigan muttered to a colleague disconsolately, “We just aren’t big enough.”

Madigan wasn’t the first Chicago Tribune loyalist to leave Cuba disappointed. Almost fifty years earlier to the day, Jules Dubois, the Chicago Tribune’s infamous Latin American correspondent, had been expelled from the island for his critical coverage of Castro, whom he had once portrayed as a young rebel commander and hero who ousted from power the cruel and corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. On the surface, Madigan bore little resemblance to Dubois, a husky, blue-eyed correspondent who had braved pistol-whipping and violence to get his stories, once reputedly filed by carrier pigeon. But each man symbolized the ambition of the Chicago Tribune as more than just another local paper on the prairies of the Midwest. Dubois, a legendary correspondent, epitomized the Tribune’s commitment to foreign reporting by a free press in the 1950s and helped found the Inter American Press Association, an organization that the Tribune continued to support for decades. A half-century later, Madigan would assume his place in Tribune lore when he bet the future of the company on the largest newspaper merger in American history.

John Madigan was not the kind of man who wore his feelings on his sleeve. One got a clue to his thinking through a fleeting comment or a slip of the tongue similar to his “not big enough” comment on the bus. His cautious demeanor was no accident. Ever since he had been passed over for the CEO job in favor of Brumback, Madigan had labored in Brumback’s shadow, a treacherous arena reserved for men with something to prove. And Brumback made sure that Madigan had his work cut out for him.

In his day, the Colonel had built a sizable and successful Canadian newsprint operation to ensure that his papers would always have an adequate, cheap supply of paper, a crucial commodity to a newspaper’s future. But paper mills consumed a lot of capital and produced pulp, a commodity. As Brumback assumed his new duties with Tribune Company in early 1989, he concluded that the Tribune Company shouldn’t be in the commodity business anymore. Canada’s political system bothered the rock-ribbed Republican, too. Brumback believed Canada’s “socialist tendencies” challenged the possibility of earning a fair return. So, over the next five years, he spun off the newsprint operation, eventually selling the whole operation to Donahue Paper Corp. of Canada.

Even more daring, Brumback, fresh from his victory over unions in Chicago, stuck his thumb in the eye of organized labor at the Daily News, the New York tabloid that had been founded by the Colonel’s cousin, Joseph Patterson, and had become a significant drain on the company’s bottom line. At the time, the Daily News was run by James Hoge, the Chicago Sun-Times editor who had quit his job across the street when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 1983. Cook had quickly hired Hoge to run the Daily News, a paper that had long been at odds with its unions. Hoge devised a phased plan in which the company would make some long-term strategic investments the New York unions sought in return for union concessions the company wanted. When Brumback came along in 1989, though, he rejected the phased approach, preferring to take on the unions directly as he had successfully done in Chicago. Hoge, who had grown up in New York but had spent much of his career in Chicago, tried to warn Brumback about the stark differences between unions and politics in Chicago and New York, where the mafia had much deeper penetration of the unions with which he had to deal. But Brumback would have none of it. He soon hired Robert Ballow, a notorious union-busting lawyer from the King & Ballow law firm in Tennessee, and by 1990 the Tribune found itself embroiled in the longest newspaper strike in New York City’s history.

Brumback’s in-your-face tactics and naïveté about Big Apple politics led to a walkout marked by torched newsstands and even more tortured politics. At one point, Brumback’s mandate to fix the Daily News, sell it, or “shut it down” had Mayor David Dinkins, Governor Mario Cuomo, and John Joseph Cardinal O’Connor in the streets backing a union boycott of the newspaper. After losing some $250 million over eleven years, Tribune paid British press lord Robert Maxwell $60 million to assume the paper’s debts and take off its hands one of the nation’s largest newspapers in one of America’s greatest markets. Maxwell entered New York with much fanfare, but it soon became apparent he needed the $60 million badly; he was broke. Shortly thereafter, he fell off his yacht and drowned in an accident that many speculated was suicide, sending the financially strapped Daily News into the hands of Mort Zuckerman, the real estate developer.

When he picked his fight with the unions, Brumback didn’t think he’d have to walk away from the Daily News, but at the end of the day, he emerged as the darling of Wall Street. Despite the problems caused by the strike and its embarrassing headlines, Brumback’s decision to dump the Daily News extricated Tribune from a financial morass in New York, freeing the company to build a powerful multimedia corporation and sending its stock into the stratosphere. The company’s stock price jumped 1 percent on the news of the Daily News sales and continued to rise. In August 1990, Brumback became CEO of Tribune Company. He was named Chairman in January 1993.

In Chicago, Madigan had won a crown jewel as a consolation prize for losing out to Brumback—CEO of Chicago Tribune Company and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, the job that ambitious executives had always used to catapult themselves into the CEO’s chair. Tribune Company CEOs rarely had ever reached the top job without a tour in the Tribune publisher’s office. But Madigan also faced a daunting challenge: He had to emerge from Brumback’s shadow to demonstrate he had the competence, decisiveness, and ability to lead the parent company. Since everyone at Tribune Tower credited Brumback with turning the Chicago Tribune into a well-oiled cash register, Madigan had a hard act to follow, particularly after Brumback ordered the newly minted Tribune publisher to ship his top local talent to New York to help him fight the unions. Meanwhile, Brumback openly expressed doubts about Madigan’s ability to succeed him. At one point late in his tenure, Brumback stunned Chicago Tribune media reporter Tim Jones, during an on-the-record interview, when he said he wouldn’t completely relinquish his leadership role in Tribune Company because he wanted to see if Madigan had the chops to run the company.

But Madigan had three things going for him that many readers of the tea leaves didn’t appreciate. One was his age. By the time he became CEO, Brumback was sixty; to appease Wall Street, Tribune Company had to start succession planning from the day he got the job. Secondly, Madigan’s only credible rival, Jim Dowdle, was a television executive at Tribune, a newspaper company at heart and one that rarely went outside its ranks for top jobs. Finally, Madigan’s biggest advantage was that he was a savvy corporate politician and knew how to play the game, far better, in fact, than almost anyone would suspect.

Taciturn, conservative, and aloof, Madigan grew up on Chicago’s North Shore, a tony strip of land adjacent to Lake Michigan populated by country clubs, wide lawns, and stately homes that scream, “A Republican Lives Here.” W. Clement Stone, the eccentric insurance tycoon who helped bankroll Richard Nixon, had a mansion on the lake. Donald Rumsfeld, the controversial U.S Defense Secretary, graduated from New Trier, the area’s well-known high school, four years before Madigan.

The son of a corporate lawyer and big University of Michigan booster, Madigan towered over almost everyone in a room, but people tended to underestimate him, probably because of his meat-and-potatoes midwestern demeanor. His buttoned-down countenance obscured a huge ego and a fierce ambitious streak that rarely surfaced in public. Don Haider, a Northwestern University professor who grew up on the North Shore and was a friend of Madigan’s sister, recalled how confident Madigan was, even as a teenager. “Griff Williams,” Haider explained, “was a high-society band leader who had three beautiful daughters. They lived in a house on Forest Avenue [near Lake Michigan] with a broad, sprawling porch. You would always see boys on the front porch; everyone wanted to date the Williams girls, especially Holly.” The competitors for Holly’s hand didn’t consider Madigan a big threat. “He was cautious, easy to underestimate,” Haider said. A handsome, clean-cut young man, Madigan wore a plaid bow tie and a houndstooth jacket in his high school yearbook photo, but he was otherwise relatively undistinguished. When the time came for Holly to make a choice, she picked Madigan. “He was either lucky or determined,” Haider surmised.

After graduating from University of Michigan with an MBA, Madigan joined Duff & Phelps, a small, midwestern investment banking firm, where he learned the newspaper business basics helping Lee Enterprises, a minor newspaper chain, sell its stock to the public. Next was a tour at Arthur Andersen, at the time, a blue-chip accounting firm based in Chicago. But Madigan’s real break came when he landed a job at the Chicago office of Salomon Brothers, led at the time by Ira Harris, a consummate wheeler-dealer whose struggles with an expansive waistline made as many headlines as his legendary deals. Harris knew Madigan from their days at the University of Michigan, and, although they hadn’t been close friends, the flashy deal maker needed someone adept at corporate finance for the investment banking division he was building at Salomon. Madigan, he soon determined, was his man. Although Harris never grafted his pizzazz onto his new student, he gave Madigan an opportunity to see investment banking through the eyes of one of its masters, and Madigan took notes. When Tribune CEO Cook sought Harris’ advice on the proper strategic direction for Tribune, a company then in private hands, Harris became a matchmaker of sorts. He put Madigan on the case to help determine whether Tribune should remain private or sell its stock to the public. Cook recalled:

The problem with being a private company is if you wanted to grow, you almost become like [your own] banker. In those days, [Tribune stock] had become quite valuable. At one point, it was worth more than $100,000 a share.... To get those shares, either someone had to give them to you or you had to acquire them from someone who had been given the stock, and those of us who were high in the company had been given the stock.... As the [founding] family got bigger and old Joe had a son and then he had five sons and they started doling out these shares, people started saying, “Why am I holding on to this stuff? I’d rather get the money,” and you start playing bank [raising cash to buy or retire the stock].

After an exhaustive review of the company, Salomon determined that it was in Tribune Company’s best interest to go public. During the evaluative process, Cook liked what he saw in the tall, presentable Madigan, and when Tribune needed a chief financial officer, Cook floated the idea by Harris. On the first day of the year in 1975, Madigan joined the Tribune as its new CFO. Madigan later recalled:

We weren’t ready to go public when I got here. Our margins were well below the industry average. We had Bob Salomon make a presentation to our management team about how we stacked up against public companies in the industry. It was one of the first times we opened up to ourselves, [to see] where we stood. Our margins were at the 5 percent level, and the Los Angeles Times was at 15 percent. I remember at the time I thought if we could ever get there it would be totally great.

He installed a system of procedures and accounts that allowed the company to accurately measure its results, dismantling antiquated financial yardsticks that fostered the gridlock, infighting, and misinformation that had plagued the company. Cook and Madigan shelved Kirkpatrick’s journalistic expansion plans to make the Tribune a midwestern powerhouse and shifted the company’s emphasis to improving productivity.

Companies convert to stockholder-owned institutions for lots of reasons. Over the years, Madigan would often talk about the importance of remaining an independent company, one controlled by local people rather than a faraway board of directors. Properly run, a newspaper is a strong instrument of local power, one that sets the agenda in a community, focuses public attention on crucial issues, and gives a community its voice. When owners know the local community and encounter the subjects of stories they publish at the local grocery store or bank, the newspaper shows it has a stake in the community and gains credibility. Cook and Madigan both felt strongly that going public would actually help Tribune remain locally controlled and independent. “Several of the private companies [had] imploded,” Madigan noted, “when big shareholders wanted [to cash in their stock holdings] it would force sales like in Louisville,” where descendants of the Bingham family sold the Louisville Courier-Journal, a respected state paper, to Allen Neuharth’s Gannett Corporation. “We had [these] big shareholders around, the descendants of the original investors in the company [the Medills, the McCormicks, the Cowles family, the Lloyds of Chicago], and some of them wanted out.... We were afraid if we didn’t provide them liquidity [or cash for their stock], they would force a sale,” a posture that would inevitably mean a loss of independence and control by Cook and his team.

Becoming a publicly held company also creates stock certificates, stock options, and lucrative benefits for corporate officers and for underwriters like Salomon Brothers, who make a bundle helping a company ready itself for sale. In his days putting together deals, Madigan had learned how to make people like Cook, Brumback, and big shareholders, including him, incredibly wealthy. By the time Cook stepped down as chairman of the company in 1993, his reported stock holdings were worth about $47 million. Madigan’s were worth about $25 million, and he had learned the game well by the time Cook moved him into the publisher’s office at the Chicago Tribune.

Professorial in demeanor, Fuller wore a beret to work, spoke softly, and looked like he’d be more at home with a glass of sherry in a university club than with a shot at the Billy Goat, the Chicago newspapermen’s watering hole. He quoted Voltaire when he talked to reporters. Madigan jokingly referred to Fuller as “the professor,” and newsroom scuttlebutt painted Fuller as “too intellectual” or “brainy” to be editor of the brawny Chicago Tribune. But Fuller’s professorial pedigree obscured his ambition and skill. Together, Fuller and Madigan formed a team that was to make the company that wasn’t “big enough” much, much bigger.

Soon after he was named editor, Fuller brought me back to Chicago from Washington to run the paper’s foreign and national news operation, a great job that put me in charge of the main news section of the Tribune, which included most of the foreign and national news. I was thrilled. I’d had a great run in Washington where I’d won some honors and accolades, and where my coverage of the savings and loan scandal had landed me a book contract. I’d also had a couple of spats with my friend Nick Horrock, whom Squires had installed as the Washington bureau chief, and I decided it was time to move on. Putting me in charge of foreign and national news gave me a major voice in how the big news stories of the day would be played, a bigger staff, and more influence than the Washington bureau chief.

As head of the Tribune’s eighteen foreign and national news bureaus and more than forty correspondents, I presided over the highly visible network that Squires had built, one that had the potential to turn heads in the world of journalism, where stature was measured by heft. More important, I gained control of the news pages where stories from the bureaus would run, including those from Washington. It was a heady experience, until I learned the truth about my little empire.

Years later, as editor of the Los Angeles Times, I would see how a professional foreign and national news staff should be organized. Working within Tribune confines and Brumback’s relentless push for the higher profits that the company promised Wall Street, Squires had built the bureaus but not the support system needed to service the growing cadre of foreign and national news reporters. If anything, he eliminated the infrastructure of supporting editors to finance the paper’s expansion, creating a team of star hitters and pitchers, while skimping on hitting and pitching coaches. From an accountant’s perspective, the staff looked incredibly productive, grinding out an admirable foreign and national news report with far fewer people or—as Brumback called them—FTEs (full-time equivalents) than papers like the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times. But in reality, the system wasn’t really that productive. Instead of spending our time crafting a journalistic strategy to capitalize on an incredible stable of talent to distinguish Tribune content from other papers and wire services, overburdened editors scrambled to edit stories rolling in from correspondents who operated without adequate guidance and feedback from the editors closest to the readers. When journalists stationed in faraway places can’t brainstorm with editors to develop customized stories, they fail to create journalistic value in their stories and fall victim to a sense of sameness. Although reporters may generate high story counts with staff bylines, economic downturns make them seem like luxuries that can be replaced by cheaper wire services (ones that pay their reporters less for stories on the same subjects).

Despite its limitations, the Tribune’s foreign and national staff worked hard for me. But the anemic support system made everyone feel like copy processors instead of editors. We always had too much to do, and someone would inevitably come along and ask us to do more. Early in my tenure, Fuller summoned me to his office to ask me to stretch myself a little thinner, to “educate” Madigan about what journalists did. Instead of waiting for the economy to tank and allow the budget cutters to diminish expensive foreign and national staff, Fuller wisely made a preemptive move by building support with friends in high places and promoting the value of Tribune journalism.

My new student knew as much about the inner workings of my newsroom as I knew about the machinations of his boardroom. At one point, Squires had banned Madigan from even entering the fourth floor, arguing that his efforts to get obituaries written about friends and relatives and his contacts with correspondents stationed in countries he was about to visit amounted to interference in the editorial process, a penetration of the wall. “All he ever cared about was his seat on the dais,” Squires later recalled. “He was always a power guy.”

But I saw a complex, contradictory man, someone who seemed dreadfully risk adverse and seemed reliably predictable, until he did something totally out of character. Madigan could be amusing, blunt, and irreverent in private, but cautious and restrained in a crowd. He would complain about stories in the paper, but encourage editors to stand up to him because he knew editors were supposed to defend their reporters. Unlike Brumback, he rarely insulted subordinates in public; he delivered his harsh words behind closed doors with a silent, steelyeyed glare as cold as Lake Michigan. He seemed genuinely interested in what journalists did and liked the irreverent newsroom more than the reverential Tribune corporate offices. Eager to learn about the political, social, and economic issues that journalists encountered on the job, he nevertheless labored under an insecure, almost irrational fear of looking foolish in public. When consul generals representing foreign countries in Chicago would call on the new publisher to talk about issues, he would summon me, or one of my staff, to attend, with the understanding that we would intervene if the conversation wandered onto unfamiliar turf. When Madigan wanted a session to end, he would speak with his eyes, giving me that “get him out of here” look, and I would show the visitor the door.

Famed newspaper publishers like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst got their hands dirty using garish headlines, fake interviews, and lavish photo spreads to win readers in the fabled New York City newspaper wars known as “yellow journalism.” But Madigan and most publishers of his era were as far removed from journalism as Chicago is from New York. The fine print that really interested Madigan and his contemporaries rested in a stock prospectus. The financial guys, lawyers and MBAs from the nation’s elite business schools, didn’t get ink on their fingers. The “journalism” they practiced wasn’t yellow, it was green, the color of money.

Across America, most papers had been gobbled up by big media companies like Tribune Company. For better or worse, the industry had started another wave of consolidation. The conventional wisdom was to buy or be bought. Most papers had started to see their share of advertising (particularly classified advertising) slip as competitors penetrated their markets. Businesses, meanwhile, had discovered they could target their commercial messages much more effectively through direct mail. Newspaper subscriptions had for the most part held up, but single copies of the paper sold on newsstands had started a permanent decline in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Internet had emerged on the scene as a threat, not only to the business side but also to editorial departments forced to compete with a new breed of news more concerned with speed and less interested in journalistic accuracy. Newspapers were becoming the medium of choice for older readers—a group that was largely anathema to advertisers. Far more so than their predecessors, executives like Madigan faced a new host of threats to the bread and butter of newspaper journalism.

A controlling person who insisted on punctuality, Madigan prized stability and discretion and, like Willes, actually seemed amazed that anyone would repeat something from a private business meeting to one of his reporters. Like the Colonel, he seemed to think he belonged to a privileged society that was exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us; he loathed waiting in line for anything, and he loved to travel the world, rubbing shoulders with world leaders, particularly if he was in the Tribune’s Falcon jet. Madigan would come to know by name almost all of the seven hundred or so reporters in the newsroom, and he sympathized with their frustration at being the Rodney Dangerfields of journalism—toiling as they did at a paper that didn’t get the respect bestowed on the newspapers on the coasts.

As they rose through the ranks, Fuller and Madigan acted as if they didn’t care about the slights. When thinking about potentially controversial policies at the Tribune, Fuller would often half jokingly wonder how a move would play with “the gods of journalism,” a reference to East Coast editors like Gene Roberts, the Philadelphia Inquirer editor famed for long-form investigative reporting. But in truth, we all resented the insolence toward our paper. When Madigan traveled to Washington to attend the fabled Gridiron dinner just after he’d been named publisher, he couldn’t get over how journalists and dignitaries fawned over Arthur Sulzberger and Katharine Graham in the drawing-room parties that preceded the dinner. Riding the elevator together after the show, Madigan expressed his frustration to Tribune bureau chief Nick Horrock, wondering aloud why Sulzberger and Graham got so much attention while he got so little. “I explained to him that they came from famed newspaper families and were not just people who ran corporations. He took it pretty well,” Horrock recalled. When asked about reasons for the shabby treatment years later, Madigan would say, “I think it’s a coast issue. I think New York and Los Angeles look down on Chicago. We’re not as good as they are. I think it is just a feeling of superiority.”

But Wall Street, for one, was not giving Tribune the cold shoulder, not in the least. By the early 1990s, Brumback’s pressure on publishers to increase their contributions to Tribune Company’s bottom line had paid off with double-digit cash flow increases. The company’s successful earnings allowed Tribune to capitalize on opportunities. Never mind the growth of the Internet, cable television had robustly expanded its reach, and the federal government had started relaxing regulations that governed who could own broadcast properties, igniting a public backlash that both the government and Tribune Company would dramatically underestimate. But Brumback, bolstered by his belief in technology, put the company squarely in the game. He started CLTV, Chicago’s twenty-four-hour local news cable channel, acquired several local television stations across the country, and placed his $5 million bet on America Online. Brumback scaled back the Tribune’s publishing division, divesting smaller newspaper properties so he could focus on his most profitable papers in Chicago and Florida.

He also started thinking about the future. Brumback realized before most other newspaper executives how the computer and its attendant technology would transform the newspaper industry. After the Tribune invested in America Online, in the early 1990s Brumback created Chicago Online, putting the Tribune Company at the vanguard of media and the Internet. He ordered Chicago Tribune content to be placed on the Internet and charged anyone for access to the stories unless they subscribed to the newspaper. He also tried to spread the gospel to the entire industry by promoting something called the New Century Network, or NCN, a consortium of the nine-largest newspaper groups in America, to pool their content so they could “monetize it,” or make money.

Brumback had zeroed in on what would become a devastating problem for newspapers as the Internet began to thrive. “Charlie had a good idea but it wasn’t the right answer,” said James Cutie, a onetime head of online news for the New York Times and a NCN board member. “The group was too large. It was composed of nine newspaper companies all sitting around the table with the same skills. If someone had had the balls to charge for our digital copy, it would be a whole different ballgame today.” Brumback later told me that he had also encountered opposition from the Chicago Tribune’s circulation department, which viewed the new technology as a threat to its ability to attract print readers.

Within three years, the NCN folded, an entrepreneurial dream plagued by differing philosophies, internecine warfare, big companies, and even bigger egos. “Charlie was trying to get Silicon Valley to invest in it, and some guy from Kleiner Perkins [Caufield & Byers] wanted to invest $5 million,” said Cutie. “Can you imagine getting all of that premium content for $5 million. We had this big meeting of all the major newspaper companies to vote on whether to go ahead. I think it was in Chicago because I thought it was like something out of the Godfather when the heads of all the crime families came there to vote about going into the drug business.” The vote was five to four against joining Kleiner Perkins, a setback that not only killed the NCN but in retrospect was a blow to the industry.

Instead of charging customers to recoup their cost of creating content, newspaper companies put the content on line for free, hoping that a bigger audience would lure enough online ad dollars to pay their costs and boost profits. It was a bad bet. Some readers quit paying for their papers because they could get the content for free online. The technology allowed advertisers to see exactly how many people looked at their ads, intelligence that led them to bid down the price of all advertising, print and online. The result: a huge problem for the media grappling with a new generation of readers reared in the Internet age, one that expects fast, free content on computer screens, cellphones, and iPads.

Brumback had better luck when he started thinking about his successor. “He came before the board and told us that we didn’t need to do a national search because we had two of the best people in the business already at the company—John Madigan and Jim Dowdle,” said Newton Minow, a company director and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who had achieved fame when he described television as a vast wasteland in the 1960s. “He then gave us a presentation on both. At the end, half the board thought he wanted Madigan and the other half thought he wanted Dowdle,” said Minow. After a year of due diligence in which he carefully sought out their respective visions of the company’s future, Brumback decided on Madigan. “I thought Madigan was the best-equipped guy to do it because of his financial background. There were a lot of financial issues then, and broadcast was a minor part of the business. I talked to them. I asked each of them to write a report on what the newspaper would look like ten to twenty years from then. Madigan had the best vision. He’s good at writing reports,” Brumback recalled.

Madigan and Fuller inherited Brumback’s legacy as a bargain hunter. Because Tribune had acquired numerous television stations, Brumback did his best to get two for the price of one—one reporter who could file reports for both the newspaper and broadcast outlets. Advocates of the idea like Howard Tyner, who had succeeded Fuller as editor of the Chicago Tribune, called the idea “synergy.” Tyner and I never really saw the world through the same lens. I felt that asking a journalist to take still and moving pictures simultaneously would only produce bad still photos and bad video. But Tyner fiercely embraced the idea championed by his bosses. He had a television camera installed in the newsroom just outside the editor’s office where Tribune print reporters would be interviewed for news shows on the company’s much ballyhooed cable television station. CLTV stood for Chicagoland Cable Television, but the old hands at WGN, the company’s more traditional station, called it Children Learning Television. The lone camera would eventually become a fully functioning television stage inside the newsroom where television anchors could interview print reporters about the stories they were covering. The studio was empty as much as it was occupied. Most television folks thought interviewing print reporters was simply bad TV.

Ambitious people always recognize the point in their careers when they need a change. I felt that way when I left a good future at the Des Moines Register and moved to the Tribune. In the mid-1990s, I got the itch to return to reporting and write a book about the consulting industry. I liked being in charge of major sections of the newspaper, but I was tired of working with far fewer resources than journalists at the New York Times or the Washington Post. Fuller had named Ann Marie Lipinski deputy managing editor for news, and we quickly became close friends and allies in a drive to make the Tribune a destination paper for investigative journalism. I confided in her that I had landed a book contract and that I was going to take a buyout to focus on writing my book. After Tyner hesitated to name Lipinski full managing editor, she was frustrated and understood my desire to make a change. About a half-hour before I was to discuss my plans with Joe Leonard, who ran the newsroom budget and headed up the buyout program, Lipinski came into my office. “You haven’t talked to Leonard yet, have you?” she implored. When I told her no, she grinned, relieved. “Good!” she exclaimed. Tyner had reconsidered and was naming her full managing editor. “I need your help running this place.” Lipinski declared. “You can’t leave.”