After seeing who Chatham Asset Management, the soon-to-be new owner of the McClatchy newspaper chain was selecting as the firm’s new C.E.O., a certain Oldies song came to mind.
The key lines of the lyrics go like this…
I’m a joker
I’m a smoker
I’m a midnight toker
…You remember the song, of course, The Joker (1973), by the Steve Miller Band. Not a great song, but once you hear those three lines, you never forget them.
And why did I think of that song? Because Tony Hunter, McClatchy’s new chief executive, has been chairman of the board of a marijuana company the last 13 months.
Hunter
Hunter, 59, also is a motivational speaker, which should come in handy since he’s going to be overseeing a lot of dispirited newspaper employees.
On a slightly more hopeful note, before he transitioned to pushing weed and telling people how they can realize their full potential, he was C.E.O. and publisher of The Chicago Tribune for eight years.
I say slightly because Tribune, which also owns papers such as the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant and the Orlando Sentinel, has been a mess the last 12 years, ever since it went from being publicly owned to privately owned. (It’s now back to being publicly owned.)
But questions about Hunter’s qualifications are not my biggest concern about the direction McClatchy, which owns 29 daily papers, including The Kansas City Star, takes from here.
No, my chief concern is that since July 12, when McClatchy announced that Chatham, a hedge fund, would be purchasing the chain out of bankruptcy, we have not heard one word from Chatham’s secretive C.E.O., 52-year-old Anthony Melchiorre.
Every release I have seen regarding the changeover has been attributed to either Chatham, the entity, or “a Chatham spokesman.”
Take Friday’s announcement about Hunter’s appointment, for example…
“Tony is an energetic, adaptive innovator with unparalleled expertise in the publishing industry. At this critical time for journalism, we are confident that his proven track record of implementing positive change and enhancing digital capabilities will serve McClatchy well,” Chatham said in a statement. “We look forward to furthering McClatchy’s legacy of informing readers and providing meaningful value to the clients and communities its publications serve.”
My theory is Melchiorre wants to keep this entire enterprise as impersonal as possible because he knows he’s going to be persona non grata after his intentions become clear.
Since he started Chatham in 2002, Melchiorre, a former junk bond trader, has been interested in just one thing: Making oodles of money. The sole goal of Chatham and other hedge funds is to maximize return on investment. They do not invest in businesses because they’re drawn to their missions or values; they invest because they see either a chance to get a good return or an opportunity to bleed cash out of failing ventures and reinvest elsewhere. (Guess which category newspapers fall into?)
So, it’s no accident that no name other than “Chatham” is attached to these news releases. Chatham and Melchiorre want to be as anonymous as possible for when the company starts laying off more people from already-paper-thin employee ranks at the company’s newspapers.
Hunter will be Melchiorre’s front man. I look for him to the hatchet man. His main job, I believe, will be to orchestrate significant cutbacks that Melchiorre will order.
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It will be interesting to see how visible Hunter will be and if he will go around to the various McClatchy papers, introduce himself to employees and answer editorial employees’ questions.
But that’s just one unknown in this unfolding transition. Two other questions I have are where will the new McClatchy have its headquarters (currently in Sacramento), and will Hunter relocate there (from his home in Boca Raton, FL)?
I tried in vain Friday to get the answers to those two questions. My efforts were almost laughable.
First, I called a woman listed as a McClatchy spokesperson in the news release about Hunter. I left her a voice message, posing the questions about the headquarters and Hunter’s intentions regarding residency. About half an hour later, a woman who works for a consulting firm that works with McClatchy returned my call and left a message saying the p.r. woman was on vacation and that the residency issue would probably be worked out between “Chatham and Mr. Hunter.” She didn’t address the headquarters issue.
I then tried to reach Kevin G. Hall, a McClatchy Washington bureau reporter who has written extensively on the bankruptcy proceedings. No one outside of Chatham would know more about what might be coming down the road, I figured.
But when I called the bureau, I encountered the telephone system from hell. I expected a programmed system, but I had no idea how maddening it would be. First, I punched the number that was supposed to transfer me to the newsroom, but I ultimately got bounced back to “The Main Menu.”
Then I punched the number that took me to the “dial by name directory.” The directions were to enter “the first few letters of the person’s name,” only it didn’t indicate whether to start with the first name or the last name. After a couple of aborted attempts, I heard the words I wanted to hear: “Transferring you to Kevin Hall.”
But, alas, as soon as it rang, the call immediately bounced back to The Main Menu. I thought that must have been an aberration and tried again. Same result — back to “The Main Menu”!
At that point, I gave up. I felt like I was caught in a vortex — which, I’m afraid, is where all of McClatchy’s approximately 3,000 remaining employees are right now.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
The good news is that now when they lay you off, they give you a bag of dope big enough that you won’t care until they’ve made sure you can no longer get in the building.
The last perk.
If only the Star had remained under employee ownership. All of the crazy debt from profiteering buyout groups could have been avoided.
That’s a huge “if only,” Bill. I can only think of one major metropolitan paper that is still family owned — the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, owned by Walter E. Hussman Jr.
Hussman is newspaper-industry hero, in my eyes. His crowning achievement was beating back a challenge from the Gannett-owned Arkansas Gazette in the late 80’s. (His paper was the Arkansas Democrat.) Gannett tried to run him out of business by lowering ad rates, but Hussman kept dropping his ad rates even lower — I think he even went to free classifieds — until, finally, in 1991, Gannett gave up and sold to him.
I remember Hussman being quoted as saying something like, “If their publisher loses, he just goes on to another paper. If I lose, I’m out of a job.”
There are others, Jim. In the Pacific Northwest, the newspapers in Seattle, Spokane, Lewiston, Idaho, and Vancouver, Washington are all family owned and very good newspapers. John Henry owns The Boston Globe. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Stuart Adelman owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which, despite the owner’s personal right-wing conservatism, is edited as a good newspaper. Glen Taylor owns the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Patrick Dolan owns Newsday. The Salt Lake Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times are not-for-profit newspapers. The Chicago Sun-Times is owned by a collection of business people, philanthropists and labor organizations in Chicago. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, owns the LA Times, and is putting out a good paper. The New York Times, though publicly traded, is controlled by the Sulzberger family, who have served as publishers in a long line of succession.
So I guess it’s just a matter of time before I won’t be hearing “The Kansas City Star March” on The Star’s website anymore and I’ll have to listen to “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver instead. Great.
Dave Z — That’s a good rundown of the non-chain-owned newspapers…I was thinking more in terms of the legacy newspaper families, like Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal), Copley (San Diego Union-Tribune) and Cowles (Des Moines Register).
I think Hussman might be the last of the legacy families still holding on as private owners…And like you say, the Sulzberger family still has controlling interest in NYT.