A Cordial Welcome for Newhouse

Usually when Publisher Sam Newhouse takes over a newspaper he is resented as an outsider and a lot of local feeling builds up against him. In Cleveland last week just the opposite happened. Announcing the purchase of the 125-year-old Plain Dealer by Newhouse, Publisher Tom Vail, 40, added that he could not be happier. "What we have now is a newspaperman committed to our programs. His first interest is the paper and its future."

Ever since he took over as publisher in 1962, ambitious Tom Vail, a descendant of Plain Dealer Founder Liberty E. Holden, had been chafing at the management of the bankers and lawyers who run the six trusts controlling the paper. "They are money people, not newspaper people," he complained. "They wanted to diversify." Then along came Newhouse, who had been trying to buy the paper, off and on, for years. In negotiations that were secret even by Newhouse's ultra security-conscious standards, he finally made a $500-a-share offer. The stockholders, who were dissatisfied with the dividends they were receiving, found the offer too generous to resist. To get 91% control of the Plain Dealer, Newhouse paid $50 million -- the highest price ever recorded for a U.S. newspaper.

Newhouse is just as pleased as Vail. With its circulation of 377,000, the Plain Dealer becomes the biggest paper in his chain of 22 U.S. dailies. As part of the deal, Newhouse also picked up a community TV antenna company, some lakeshore property on Cleveland's west side and the Art Gravure Corp., which prints Sunday supplements.

Moreover, Newhouse is getting a paper that has been making a name for itself. Energetic Vail has considerably improved the editorial content with imaginative local coverage and investigative reporting. Under his five-year-old regime, circulation has jumped 15%, putting the Plain Dealer closer to the afternoon Cleveland Press circulation of 382,000.

As he normally does with papers he has acquired, Newhouse is leaving the present management, namely Vail, in control. "I have a freer hand than before," says Vail, who believes that Newhouse--unlike the bankers--will give him backing in his plans for further expansion.

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