When he started purchasing newspapers, he said “I wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t keep me busy for a while.” Asked why people sell their newspapers to him, he said, “I believe it’s because some people send someone else in. I come myself. I don’t go with three offers in my pocket. I sit across the table and tell them what I can do.” Pops would make an offer on the spot and “knock off a letter of agreement right there, and that’s the end of it. I like to deal with the person who can make the decision and make it stick.”
“In all acquisitions,” he told students at Cornell Johnson Business of Management School in 1976, “offer to buy for cash. It sure gets you the best price and will knock out of the box the fellow who offers a small down payment and paper on the property he is buying.”
Whether it was a broadcast station or a newspaper, my father was able to make personal assessments that pinpointed any weakness on the part of the seller that could be used to his advantage. Generally he was dead-on when it came to evaluating and persuading people when he was going after an acquisition.
As Babcock points out, “One owner was an old man with an unprepared son-in-law his obvious successor. Pops convinced the senior he would earn more from investing the cash purchase money and not have to worry about the future. Another was an owner whose family succession was to a twelve-year-old son. A third was a gentleman frequently at odds with his son’s decisions. He took the cash, and his son was trained to be an exemplary manager. The seller was satisfied. He died happy, if not as rich as he could have been by shopping the property.
“In another case, a newspaper owner’s wife had terminal cancer. Pops offered a pretty fair price—all cash and quickly—and wrapped up the deal overnight. After working with him closely over the years, Johnnie said, “There was almost always a highly personal weakness for selling to which Pops homed in on like a bird dog on scent.” And he was persistent. Aside from studying his prospects, if the initial meeting did not result in a definitive possibility of a sale, my father stayed in touch with his targets through gifts and letters on a steady basis.
Other newspapers were sold to my father for tax reasons and included payments over several years to reduce the seller’s tax liability. Rep. Morris K. Udall, D-AZ, pointed out, as reported in 1979 by Virgil Gaither in the Tulsa Tribune: Even if, in its wisdom and within its discretion, the IRS should find the value of this newspaper to be “only” $7.5 million, the tax rate would require payment of over $5 million. This would still be more than one owner could borrow, since interest charges would be better than double the earnings of the newspaper. Is it any wonder that the heirs must sell, or that an owner sells prior to death to put his estate in order? There are no other options.17 But most of the time the newspapers did not come to him, so Pops went after them with an offer that was too good to pass up. “Some people want cash, and we’ll pay cash,” he said. His method of operation was the same: he courted the owners using his Southern charm and reputation as a sharp businessman. He promised to keep the papers just as they had always been, and his offer usually included a deal in which the owner kept control of the paper for a few years.
As an example of how aggressive his approach to prospecting and recruiting was, I came across this letter to my father from the publisher from the Sampson Independent dated July 21, 1981: I wanted to write you to explain my actions at the banquet for the NC Press Association. I am not sure what I said to you when you asked me about joining your organization—frankly I was so shocked I did not know what to say. After reflecting back, I think I told you that I was happy where I am, which is the case.
I am 57 years old and have lived in Clinton for 16 years. I have a good job here, I have a pleasant relationship with Jim Boone and others in this organization and the portion of the newspaper, plus some other publications have found the job of continuing this paper in what we would like it to be is a job that greatly interests me. Neither my wife nor I have any great desire in moving, unless of course, we become bored with our situation here.
I hope I was not rude to you, and I am still not quite sure what I said to you. In any case, I am flattered that you would consider me for a job in your organization.
But more often than not his persistence and ability to close the deal paid off. As Gaither reported in the Tulsa Tribune: Such was the case with C.A. McWilliams, who sold the Broken Arrow Ledger, a daily, and three weeklies, the Jenks Journal, Bixby Bulletin and Tulsa Southside Times, to Park Newspapers, a New York–based chain which now owns a total of nine Oklahoma newspapers, including the dailies Sapulpa Herald and McAlester News-Capital & Democrat.
Although he did not disclose the selling price, McWilliams said he and his wife “always had a policy that if anyone wanted it [the newspapers] badly enough, we would sell it. They [Park] wanted it, so they bought it.”
McWilliams indicated he had been approached about selling by publishing firms within Oklahoma, but said their offers were much lower than Park’s. “The key is that they [the chains] are aggressive. They have people out all the time looking for papers to buy,” McWilliams said.
“At one time I had the ambition of owning several papers, but I was so busy running what I had that I didn’t have time to go out chasing down leads,” he added. “A lot of people, for instance, would like to have bought the Sapulpa paper, but they [the Park chain] were in there after it. The same with the McAlester paper.”18 As Jim Dumbell reported in his interview with my father in the Charlotte Observer: Some newspaper experts say Park has a reputation for being more interested in the financial than the journalistic side of newspapers….
John Morton, a Washington, D.C., newspaper analyst, says of Park, “He has a reputation for being a very tight-fisted operator. I’m not aware of any of his papers being notably improved. But not otherwise, either. And I gather he’s paid fairly good prices. I understand he’s been willing to pay somewhat more dearly than others.” When it comes to a purchase price, Park says, “If you get a good property and a good market, it doesn’t really matter if you pay a little too much for it. It’s what you can do with it that’s important.”19 Pops’ strategy after acquiring a newspaper with cash, if not on hand then readily borrowed from a bank, was to let the local management run it. He was mainly interested in seeing that the properties turned a profit. Only twenty-five or so people were employed at Park headquarters in Ithaca, and my father was cautious about the speed at which his acquisitions grew. “We may add one [paper to the chain] per quarter. If we added more than that, we would have to increase our staff,” he explained. God forbid his payroll would have to go up.