The
Gannett Company, founded by Frank Gannett in Rochester
in 1906, is an international corporation with headquarters
in McLean, Virginia. Its daily newspaper group circulation
is more than 7 million and includes USA Today,
a highly popular, nationally distributed daily.
[Lead Photo: Frank Gannett at a rally
during his 1940 bid for the Republican presidential nomination]
When
Frank Gannett died, the Unitarian Register published
the following report in February 1958.
FRANK
GANNETT DIES
Frank
Gannett, 81, Rochester, N.Y., publisher and one of the nation’s
most eminent Unitarian laymen, died December 3, 1957, of
complications resulting from a fall suffered the preceding
April.
Funeral services were conducted in the First Unitarian Church
of Rochester by Dr. David Rhys Williams, who had been Mr.
Gannett's minister for nearly 30 years.
Mr. Gannett was noted for the development of his publishing
group of 22 newspapers in 18 cities. The Gannett Company
also owns four radio and three television stations.
Mr. Gannett's other achievements and activities were numerous,
and he was the recipient of many honors.
A Republican, he campaigned as an avowed presidential candidate
in 1939 and 1940, and his name went before the convention
at which Wendell Wilikie was nominated. He urged 25 years
ago the inclusion of a Secretary of Peace in the President's
cabinet.
Mr. Gannett also was noted for his philanthropic support
of research, especially in the newspaper and aviation industries
and in the fields of health and medicine. One of the projects
he supported produced the Teletypesetter, a typesetting
device which can be operated at long distances by electrical
impulses. Another was a $500,000 grant by the Gannett Newspaper
Foundation to build a student health clinic at Cornell University,
Ithaca, N.Y. He also was keenly interested in the development
of public recreation facilities.
Honors conferred upon Mr. Gannett included the Civic Medal
of the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences, received jointly
with his wife; honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa; the
Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award; an honorary degree
of doctor of journalism from Bradley University and a long
list of other honorary doctor's and master's degrees.
Mr. Gannett's newspaper ventures began with his purchase
in 1906 of a half-interest in the Elmira, N. Y., Gazette.
The Gazette absorbed competition in the Ithaca-Elmira
area, and he bought in 1918 two Rochester newspapers, merging
them into the Times-Union, and moved to Rochester.
There he looked up a distant cousin, Rev. William Gannett,
who was minister of the Unitarian church. Mr. Gannett shortly
became a Unitarian and remained throughout the ensuing years
a leader in the church.
Noting that most of the persons attending the funeral were
familiar with the story of Mr. Gannett's life, Dr. Williams
said that “there is one phase of that story about which
I may be presumed to speak with some measure of authority.
I refer to his religious life.
"Frank Gannett took his religious duties seriously.
He made a conscientious effort to be present in the church
of his choice on as many Sunday mornings in the year as
his health and other obligations would permit.
"I have many reasons to cherish the memory of this
man, but I shall cherish it most of all because be faithfully
supported not only the freedom of the press over the years,
but also the freedom of this pulpit during a 30-year ministry
which must often have tried his faith in such a freedom.
He was one who could disagree completely with the content
of any specific sermon and still find inspiration in the
sincerity of its utterance.
"lt has been a rare privilege and a challenging responsibility
to serve as his minister, for his religion was bound by
no narrow creed. It was to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly before God."
Frank
Gannett was born Sept. 15, 1876. The nation was still smarting
over the deaths nearly three months earlier of Col. George
A. Custer and 210 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry at the hands
of the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Transcontinental
rail travel had been achieved only seven years earlier.
Three years before Gannett bought into his first newspaper
partnership in Elmira, N.Y., in 1906, Wilbur and Orville
Wright achieved the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air
machine at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
Gannett saw warfare intensify from the Spanish-American
War's mounted cavalry charges to World War II's atomic devastation.
Just a few weeks after he died in 1957, Explorer I was the
first U.S. earth satellite to be launched into orbit at
Cape Canaveral, Fla. And within a year, National Airlines
began domestic jet airline service in the United States
with a flight between New York City and Miami.
The contrasts in Gannett's own life were equally remarkable.
At his death he had achieved wealth that amply qualified
for the denigrating cliche "filthy rich." Yet
he was born in upstate New York's hardscrabble country to
struggling farmers who could accurately be described as
dirt poor.
Despite having the means to indulge the trappings of leisure,
he set a personal example of his belief in hard work.
He was accused by labor of being a pinch-penny, for which
there is considerable evidence, yet condemned as a traitor
by fellow businessmen for his early advocacy of profit-sharing
and pension plans.
As a child of struggling parents, he wrote and spoke fervently
against the railroads, the trusts and monopolies. As a successful
businessman, he was distressed by envious condemnations
of his newspapers as monopolistic predators on their communities.
His early newspapers staunchly supported the Democratic
Party, yet he went on in his 60s to mount a quixotic and
ill-fated campaign for the Republican nomination for president.
The
products of Gannett philanthropy: Background: The Frank Gannett Building at the
Rochester Institute of Technology, which houses photography,
printing science, and graphic arts programs. Inset left: An animation produced by the RIT
graphic arts program. Inset right: The Frank E. Gannett Memorial
Library at Utica College
He
was an acquaintance and early supporter of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, but founded and mobilized the National Committee
to Uphold Constitutional Government, which was the primary
deterrent to FDR's attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.
He went
from evangelical isolationism in the late 1930s to unstinting
support of the Allied effort to win World War II. His eloquent
tributes to First Amendment freedoms were occasionally sullied
by intemperate and unsubstantiated attacks on Roosevelt.
Stereotypical caricatures of him as a grasping profiteer
contradicted his ready philanthropies, not the least of
which was placing most of his fortune into a foundation
to provide job security for Gannett employees and assist
the communities they served.
Vin Jones, who succeeded Fay Blanchard as head of the News
and Editorial Office, recalled, "One of the odd things
about Frank Gannett was he hated radio and television. God,
he couldn't stand them, although he owned several radio
stations. He never wrote anything that he didn't just absolutely
castigate radio and television."
THE
GANNETT COMPANY
The
headquarters of the Gannett Company.
Founder
of a modest newspaper chain made up of medium-sized dailies
in New York and New Jersey, Frank Gannett paved the way
for the establishment of a $3 billion multimedia conglomerate.
By the 1930s, the Gannett chain was already among the six
largest in the nation. After Gannett's death, his corporation
converted to public ownership and became the largest newspaper
company in the nation. It also pioneered the successful
national publication USA Today in the 1980s.
A native of New York, Frank E. Gannett (1876-1957) worked
his way through college at Cornell and purchased the Elmira
Star-Gazette in 1906 after a brief newspaper stint in
Ithaca and Pittsburgh. By the end of the 1920s, Gannett
owned 15 dailies in medium-sized markets in New York as
well as a few papers in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois.
Determined that his papers would reflect editorial independence,
Gannett allowed local editors to set editorial policy. Gannett
showed a keen business sense as well as a regard for the
nurturing of public goodwill. The principal supplier of
newsprint, International Paper Company, owned stock in four
Gannett papers in the 1920s and sought to influence their
policies. After the Federal Trade Commission publicized
the extent of International's newspaper influence in 1928,
Gannett quickly paid off his debts to International and
ended dealings with the company.
The major expansion of the Gannett chain, directed by chief
executive Paul Miller, came after its founder's death in
1957. Miller anticipated an important trend in media industries
in 1967 when he made Gannett a publicly owned company. The
company possessed only about 16 dailies in 1957, but 20
years later, its 73 dailies made Gannett the largest newspaper
chain in the United States. Much of the expansion came by
purchasing smaller chains rather than individual properties:
Westchester Rockland (1964), Federated and the Honolulu
Star-Bulletin group (1971), and Speidel (1976). Although
Gannett had the most papers in 1977, it ranked fourth in
circulation among the chains, with 2.9 million.
Frank
Gannett's interest in technological advancement was
keen. He was one of the earliest champions of the teletypesetter,
believing —correctly— that it would dramatically
change the way newspapers gathered and reported news.
The
major splash by Gannett came in 1982 under chief executive
Allen Neuharth with the launching of the national circulation,
computer copy-set USAToday. It was a serious gamble
that has made Gannett even more influential and wealthy.
USA Today was published five days a week and featured
concise news stories interspersed with charts, graphs, pictures,
and lots of color. It targeted a vast general-interest audience,
with a focus on national and international news events,
entertainment, financial news, and sports. Gannett spent
a lot of money to research its future product before beginning
publication. After one year, the circulation surpassed the
500,000 figure; by 1989, its circulation of 1.3 million
was second only to the Wall Street Journal. However,
advertising did not keep pace with sales, and USA Today
lost money from the outset. USA Today was also published
in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland.
The USA Today experiment did not divert Gannett from
its previous newspaper acquisition program. In fact, Gannett
began to purchase some major dailies under Neuharth's successor
John Curley. The company paid $315 million for the Louisville
Courier-Journal and obtained the Des Moines Register
from the Cowles family for $200 million, both in 1986. It
also added the Detroit News to its holdings for $717
million. By 1987, Gannett revenues passed the $2.7 billion
mark, compared with 1967 revenues of $186 million. In 1988,
Gannett newspapers numbered 89 dailies with a circulation
of over 6 million—no longer first in the number of
papers, but number one in circulation. Gannett had also
diversified into broadcast ownership (12 percent of revenues)
advertising (7 percent of revenues), but newspapers continued
to dominate company holdings. Gannett established its own
news service—open only to company newspapers and broadcast
stations. The company also founded a Center for Media Studies
in New York City, headed by Everette Dennis, to examine
various elements in media such as technology and ethics.
From
The Media in America by Daniel Webster Hollis, III
COMPANY
PROFILE
Gannett
Co., Inc. is a large diversified news and information company.
Here is a brief rundown of its operations in the USA and
abroad:
OPERATIONS WORLDWIDE: Gannett is an international company
with headquarters in McLean, Va., and operations in 43 states,
the District of Columbia, Guam, the United Kingdom, Belgium,
Germany, Italy and Hong Kong.
NEWSPAPERS: Gannett is the USA's largest newspaper group
in terms of circulation. The company's 95 daily newspapers
in the USA have a combined daily paid circulation of 7.7
million. They include USA TODAY, the nation's largest-selling
daily newspaper, with a circulation of approximately 2.3
million. USA TODAY is available in 60 countries worldwide.
In addition, Gannett owns a variety of non-daily publications
and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine of 23.6
million circulation delivered in 591 Gannett and non-Gannett
newspapers.
Newsquest plc, a wholly owned Gannett subsidiary
acquired in mid-1999, is the largest regional newspaper
publisher in England with a portfolio of more than 300 titles.
Its publications include 15 daily newspapers with a combined
circulation of approximately 600,000. Newsquest also publishes
a variety of non-daily publications including Berrow's Worcester
Journal, the oldest continuously published newspaper
in the world.
BROADCASTING: The company owns and operates 22 television
stations covering 17.7 percent of the USA.
ON THE INTERNET: Gannett has more than 100 web sites in
the United States and the United Kingdom including USATODAY.com,
one of the top newspaper sites on the Internet.
OTHER VENTURES: Other company operations include Gannett
News Service; Gannett Retail Advertising Group; Gannett
TeleMarketing, Inc.; Gannett New Business and Product Development;
Gannett Direct Marketing Services; Gannett Offset, a commercial
printing operation; Gannett Media Technologies International;
and Telematch, a database marketing company.
HISTORY
AND FINANCIAL: Founded by Frank E. Gannett and associates
in 1906, Gannett was incorporated in 1923 and listed on
the New York Stock Exchange in 1967. The company has approximately
51,500 employees. Its more than 265 million shares of common
stock are held by approximately 13,700 shareholders of record
in all 50 states and abroad.
Gannett recorded $6.3 billion in operating revenue in 2001.
Map
of states, with the United Kingdom, served by Gannett
newspapers or television stations
2000
Financial Summary of the Gannett Foundation
Total Number of Grants: 1,441
Education
Civic and Community
Health and Mental Health
Social Services
Arts and Culture
Media
United Way Total
Matching Gifts Grand Total
Almost
a century after the founding of the Gannett Company—and
nearly half a century after the death of the founder—an
attack on the corporation was published in 1996 by the University
of Missouri Press: The Chain Gang: One Newspaper versus
the Gannett Empire. It was written by Richard McCord,
a celebrated journalist who had worked with Bill Moyers
for years on the staff of Newsday, New York. Concerning
this investigative report Ben
Bagdikian—Unitarian Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist—declares:
"Richard
McCord's The Chain Gang takes the losing battle
for the soul of American newspapers from the euphoria
accounts on financial pages to show what corporate news
chains can mean in human terms to the people and the
vitality of the victimized cities and towns. His is
a unique account of the power and depredations of the
Gannett Chain under its glib empire builder, Allen Neuharth.
It goes behind the facade of slick public information
and financial killings for investors to show what happens
when a ruthless and ambitious wheeler-dealer gets control
of our news. "
Were
he able to do so, might not the socially alert Notable American
Unitarian, Frank Gannett, vigorously agree with the attack
of Richard McCord?
