Casting Off the Chain

Gannett sells the Oakland Tribune to its black publisher

For scores of America's locally owned newspapers, death and estate taxes have led to another apparent inevitability: sale to a chain. Last week, however, the 109-year-old Oakland (Calif.) Tribune (circ. 174,000) reversed the trend. Gannett, the nation's biggest newspaper group (86 dailies), sold the money-losing Tribune to Journalist Robert Maynard, 45, who is, like 47% of Oakland's residents, black. Said Gannett Chairman Allen Neuharth: "We had other prospective buyers, but we felt it desirable for the community to have a dedicated local owner."

New Owner Maynard has been at the Tribune as editor since 1979 and publisher since 1981. He believes he is the first black to hold any of his positions at a large metropolitan daily with a primarily (62%) white readership. But he dismisses his ground-breaking status as "one of the world's more boring statistics." Says he: "The issue is the quality of the paper, not the color of the executive."

One of California's most influential papers during the 62 years it belonged to the family of the late Republican Senate Leader William F. Knowland, the Tribune slipped along with its city in the 1960s and 1970s. Maynard broadened sports and business coverage and gave the paper visibility with four "blockbuster" reports of at least ten pages each on gritty urban problems: jobs, schools, drugs and murder.

Maynard bought the Tribune without putting up any cash. The $22 million price, steep for a paper that lost $3 million last year, came entirely from loans, $17 million from Gannett. The chain's generosity was prompted in part by a federal antitrust regulation that prevented it from owning both the paper and a San Francisco TV station, KRON, which Gannett had avidly pursued. Says Maynard: "Gannett's position could have been stronger."

Maynard holds 79% of the paper's stock; the rest belongs to Los Angeles Attorney Paul Greenberg, a vice president at San Francisco's Shaklee Corp., who negotiated the deal. Directors include Maynard's wife, Journalist Nancy Hicks; Author Alex Haley (Roots); and former Movie Star and Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, who is a close friend of Maynard's.

The paper's six unions have agreed to a wage freeze until July 1984, a subsequent 6% cap on annual raises through mid-1988 and reduction of the total staff from 950 to 910, mostly through attrition. But to return the paper to profitability, Maynard says, he must boost classified advertising, take advantage of the renaissance of Oakland's business district and fatten circulation in the city's affluent white suburbs, which supply 142,000 readers to the cross-bay San Francisco papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner.

A child of immigrants from Barbados who owned a small trucking concern in Brooklyn, Maynard dropped out of high school to write for neighborhood and ethnic publications. In 1961 he joined the York (Pa.) Gazette and Daily as a reporter. He became a Nieman fellow in journalism at Harvard, then was hired by the Washington Post, "where I went from covering riots to covering the White House." He left in 1977 for the Berkeley campus of the University of California to establish a training program for minority journalists, which he ran, in his words, "like a bootcamp." Maynard applies the same tough standards to his own work. "There is no way for a poor man to get to own a newspaper," he says, "unless it is a paper that requires a lot of himself.'' . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.