Stock-Market Racing Form

Like most conglomerates, Media General, Inc. has been concentrating on acquisitions. It has picked up the Newark Evening News and four smaller papers to add to its original pair in Richmond. Now it is taking a new tack, creating rather than buying a paper. Crammed with charts and up-to-the-minute analyses of 3,250 stocks, the 72 pages of Media General Financial Daily consist almost entirely of figures. They amount to a sort of stock-market racing form. The price: a dollar a day.

In the past five weeks, Media General has sent sample copies to 100,000 potential Eastern Seaboard readers.

Some 1,500 have signed up, and more than 50 new orders arrive each day. "If we get 25,000 subscriptions in the first year," says Media General President Alan Donnahoe, 55, "we will be doing very well."

Doing well has been a Donnahoe habit from the start. The youngest of ten children, he was forced to find work at 15 when his father died. He set type, swept floors, and ran errands for the Asheville (N.C.) Weekly Advocate, working 60 hours a week for $12. In his spare time, Donnahoe studied law at home, and passed the North Carolina bar exams at 21 without a formal legal education. After moving to Richmond, he served as publicity and research director for the Chamber of Commerce there, studied the science of statistics in off hours, and soon became so expert that he was invited to lecture on the subject at the University of Richmond.

Richmond Newspapers, Inc. (Times-Dispatch and News Leader) hired him in 1950 as research director and part-time editorial writer to work alongside the noted conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Donnahoe had risen to executive vice president by 1966 when D. Tennant Bryan, the patrician third-generation publisher, decided that the papers should go public. In 1969 the corporation was renamed Media General, with Bryan as chairman and Donnahoe as president.

Fighting Strikes. Donnahoe set out on a shopping spree and bought the Tampa Times and Tribune in Florida, the Winston-Salem Journal and Twin City Sentinel in North Carolina, as well as the Newark Evening News. Other acquisitions included a television station in Tampa and a cable-TV system in Fredericksburg, Va. Most of Media General's properties are profitable, but labor difficulties have dogged Donnahoe in Richmond and Newark.

Printers at the Richmond papers have been on strike since March, and a Newspaper Guild strike has shut down the Evening News in Newark since May. Donnahoe is determined not to give in to union demands. He has written several editorials praising nonstriking employees in Richmond for their "heroic publishing effort," and attacking "the overwhelming power of organized labor in this country" and "union tyranny." He kept the papers going by teaching other employees to set type. In the early days of the Richmond strike, he even pressed his wife into service as a tape puncher, and Chairman Bryan pitched in as part-time proofreader.

The Newark situation is stalemated in bitterness. One Guild official has called Donnahoe a "carpetbagger out of the South," and the Guild claims that he is stalling on negotiations. Donnahoe reportedly would rather sell the paper than settle on the Guild's terms.

Feeding the Need. Media General's labor troubles do not affect Donnahoe's new brainchild, largely because the Financial Daily is probably the most automated newspaper ever produced. Three years and more than $2,000,000 went into its creation. When the New York financial markets close at 3:30 p.m., stock data are transmitted by tape over the Associated Press wire and fed into computers programmed with information on 8,000 companies. The computers are linked to a new cathode-ray typesetter, which composes a whole newspaper page in one minute. The Financial Daily is then printed between the press runs of the Richmond papers. "From the technological viewpoint," says Donnahoe proudly, "we think we have the most sophisticated newspaper in the world."

Papers are flown to New York and Boston each evening in a leased DC-6 to ensure next-morning delivery in Northeastern financial centers where circulation is concentrated. If demand dictates, Donnahoe will link Midwest and West Coast printing plants to his Richmond computers, and he is already planning a weekend summary edition for readers who do not need daily data.

Donnahoe runs Media General as a decentralized operation, keeping in touch with his managers by telephone, driving his staff hard, and making decisions with the help of his own personal computer beside his Richmond desk. Says one executive: "Donnahoe is like a computer himself where figures are involved." He demands statistics-laden reports from top subordinates, but lengthy committee meetings bore him. Incisiveness is his great strength--plus efficient speed. He leaves his Richmond office promptly at 5 p.m. almost every day and sometimes drives to a nearby country club, where he works hard at trimming a golf handicap of ten. Ever the statistician, Donnahoe has even devised a new handicap system of his own. Some day he hopes to get away from his computers long enough to write a book about it.

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