Paper Assets: Eager Buyers in Gary
Will it continue to? We don’t know. The Post-Tribune is for sale.
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Knight-Ridder is a Miami-based corporation that reported $2 billion in revenues and $155 million in profits for the ’87 fiscal year. The Post-Tribune, circulation 76,000, is a lot more important to northwest Indiana than it has ever been to its owners.
The idea hit Conn immediately.
The tax advantages available to ESOP investors are part of what makes ESOPs fly, Conn explained. The other part of it is that the employees cut their own wages. “We’ve been telling our people it might be a little bit painful to become “owners,” he said. “But the point is, if someone else comes in and buys us, we might suffer the same economic shock.
Ward Just, who lives in Paris now, returned to Chicago to promote his new novel, Jack Gance. It’s a fine book, but we wanted to ask him about an earlier novel, the autobiographical A Family Trust, based on his family’s ownership of the Waukegan News-Sun. “What you get from there,” said Just, who hadn’t thought about this 1978 work of his for some time, “is the whole notion of a family newspaper where the newspaper becomes inseparable from the family and the family inseparable from the newspaper. It becomes almost a human being.”
“It was absolutely classic what happened to my family,” he said. “My grandfather was the editor, my father was the publisher, and I was the writer. And of all of those three, the editor can fit in, and the publisher can fit in. There’s no way for a writer to fit into Waukegan. What are you going to write about? Very early in my career I took a different turn. I quit the paper in ’59 and went to work for Newsweek. I was chairman for whatever the hell that was–13 years. I did my duty. But I don’t think I was a very good chairman.”
