UPI’s Salvation
In 1982 two young Baha’i entrepreneurs whose media savvy consisted of the lessons learned in a year of running Joliet’s Channel 66 purchased storied United Press International for a price you could have handled yourself. The Scripps-Howard newspaper chain paid Doug Ruhe and Bill Geissler $5 million to take the gallant 75-year-old, perennially unprofitable wire service off its hands.
The wire service’s next savior was one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, Mario Vazquez-Rana, owner of the El Sol newspaper group. Two years later Vazquez-Rana stagggered away $70 million poorer. He’d rescued the wire service from bankruptcy, but now it was losing up to $2 million a month.
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An ad appeared in the Positions Wanted column of Editor & Publisher. It said: “For 84 years UPI has served the news industry. We, the reporters, editors and photographers of UPI are proud of that history and that service. Many of us now face layoffs or management decisions that make it impossible to continue that tradition with integrity. We offer talent, experience, dedication, integrity and loyalty and, regretfully, we now seek new professional homes where those attributes are valued.”
On May 13, two days before UPI was due to run out of money, a greater fool emerged–a fool of God, no less! Ordered onto the auction block by a bankruptcy judge, UPI in its entirety received one bid–of $6 million (contingent on a study of the books) by televangelist Pat Robertson.
“I expect and have been told he intends to run UPI as a business, a business covering news,” said Geimann. “And the way you run a successful business covering news is to provide a service people want to buy. What they want to buy is quality, fairness, balance, accuracy, speed, expertise, professionalism. And those qualities describe what UPI has been for 85 years.”
Including a radio station in Saint Louis? we asked him. We thought of all the old clients there we used to write radio briefs for every hour.
A Unipresser since 1973, Kreiter hangs in because she still likes to beat the AP and sometimes still does. We met her in the UPI’s new Chicago bureau, which is nothing like the big and noisy one we remember. The teletypes are gone and so are most of the people.
