The Chain That Doesn't Bind

For the first time in the history of Pulitzer prizes, a single publisher, John S. Knight, 73, carried off three of them last week. His Detroit Free Press won top prize for local general reporting, the Charlotte Observer's Eugene Gray Payne was named best cartoonist, and Knight himself was cited for editorial writing. It was a day of rare honors for a publisher who has not gone out of his way to seek them.*

Knight has never fancied himself a domineering press lord. Preferring to call his papers a group, not a chain, he encourages local autonomy, and his papers make the most of it. The Detroit Free Press (circ. 605,000), the Miami Herald (369,600), the Charlotte Observer (177,950), the Akron Beacon Journal (178,147), the Charlotte News (63,772) and the Tallahassee Democrat (29,300) are all increasing their circulation and are highly profitable. With interests in one television and three radio stations as well as three Florida weeklies, the group's total revenues reached $123 million in 1967, up $4,000,000 from the year before. 'Net income, however, was down from $9,000,000 in 1966 to $8,000,000 last year, mainly because of the 26-week strike against the Free Press that still shows no sign of ending.

Ruthlessly Local. Authority is generously delegated all down the line at Knight newspapers. Reporters are free to pursue a story as long as they think it is worth it. This has produced some memorable series, including the Free Press's Pulitzer-winning analysis of last summer's ghetto riots. For five weeks a trio of reporters investigated every one of the 43 deaths that occurred during the riots. As a result of the series, three white policemen and a Negro watchman were indicted this month for conspiring to violate the civil rights of eight Negroes held in a motel (two of the Negroes had been shot and killed).

Last month, the Charlotte Observer wound up a searching seven-week report on conditions among North Carolina's poor, both black and white. Reporters Dwayne Walls and James Batten even traveled to Chicago and Washington to discover how North Carolina migrants were faring; most were disillusioned and not doing much better than they had done at home.

Knight's dailies are all locally oriented. "I would rather miss the big national story," says Beacon Journal Publisher and Executive Editor Ben Maidenburg. "The reader is going to get that on TV or the New York Times or the newsmagazines. I would rather get that Rotary Club meeting or the Junior Chamber of Commerce story instead." That fits in with Knight's thinking. "It is our obligation to print a lot of local news," he says. "We do very well at it; sometimes, I must confess, to the point where I feel it is boring." To report this news, the papers hire youngsters fresh from college and pay them reasonably well; otherwise, editorial budgets are lean. In three or four years, reporters generally move on to publications of more national scope.

Dissenters Wanted. Knight encourages all his papers to take strong positions on political issues. They are free to disagree with him and among themselves. In the 1962 Ohio gubernatorial campaign, the Beacon Journal supported Democratic Candidate Michael Di Salle. Editor Maidenburg, who dissented, was permitted to run his own signed editorials backing Republican James Rhodes, the eventual winner.

Knight's home base is in Akron, where he inherited the Beacon Journal from his father in 1933. Every month he travels to one of his newspapers for a day's consultation. He reads all his papers every day, insists that every editorial be initialed so that he will know who writes it. His favorite activity comes each Thursday, when he closets himself in his office and works on his weekly column, for which he won the Pulitzer. Although he is a conservative, he has been a consistent opponent of the Viet Nam war; for the past year, he has written about little else. He is blunt--crusty, even--but never rash. As a man who does not hesitate to speak his own mind, he has made it a firm policy to let others speak theirs.

*Among the other Pulitzer winners: William Styron, the fiction prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner; George F. Kennan, the biography award for Memoirs: 1925-1950; Will and Ariel Durant, the general nonfiction laurels for the tenth and final volume of The Story of Civilization.

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