The Peripatetic Jim Bellows   

The Last Editor: How I Saved the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency

By Jim Bellows

Andrews McMeel Publishing

368 pages; $28.95

It is fair to say that Jim Bellows has held few steady jobs, been fired or separated from top positions in every medium from print to TV to cyberspace, and helped bury a near-record number of media operations. Yet it seems entirely reasonable to regard him as a lion of the business, to see him repeatedly described here as legendary and to learn that he considers himself "the luckiest guy in the newspaper business."

Of course, this is Bellows' own book, and it is also fair to say there is not much ego-suppression going on. From the subtitle to the first sentence ("Jim Bellows loved a brawl") to the numerous apparently solicited testimonials from former colleagues, "The Last Editor" serves up an outsized version of Jim Bellows, Super-editor.

But Bellows carries it off with winning verve and spirit, and he emerges as a likable, impassioned leader with a flair for grand journalism. In reviewing what he calls "the first 80 years," Bellows whirlwinds through a gold-framed résumé: editor, New York Herald Tribune; editor, Washington Star; editor, Los Angeles Herald Examiner; managing editor, "Entertainment Tonight"; executive producer, "USA Today on TV"; editorial director, Prodigy; executive editor, Excite Web service. (See "The Last Confederate General," June 1992.)

You'll notice that many of these outlets no longer exist. Unhappy endings are a Bellows trademark. A self-described "kamikaze journalist," he admits, "I have always been more comfortable working for the struggling underdog."

He grew up as a shy, barely 5-foot-tall high-school senior nicknamed "Maggot" who quickly learned, "I don't attract people to me because I am articulate, or tall, or handsome, or funny. I'm none of those things." Instead, "maybe I substituted vision for power, and it worked out pretty well."

Ego sometimes gets bad press, and it should be said that strong journalists, especially editors, need a healthy dose of it. Bellows, fortunately, has the ego of an impresario, not a nitpicker. Says Jimmy Breslin, a writer Bellows unleashed: "He would praise and then fight for anything he liked. If the idea wasn't his, he fought even more furiously."

Embracing other people's good ideas is an uncommon virtue among editors, but Bellows evidently has great instincts both for ideas and people.

People "want exactly what Aristotle said the ancient Greek audiences wanted – to be informed and entertained," he writes.

With that in mind, Bellows launched one "suicide mission" after another, eagerly taking on the top media hounds. "Affluence breeds sobriety," he says. "Abundance breeds dullness in a newspaper."

But abundance lights an inferno under pesky competitors. The three papers listed in "The Last Editor's" subtitle are not those he worked for but papers he challenged with a "sassy and irreverent" strategy: amass talent, let it loose, needle the competition and hype the buzz.

"I redefined news," he boasts. "Now entertainment was news, gossip was news, finance was news, sports was news, anything that was new and would interest people was news."

Talent stuck to him like a magnet, people like Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy, Clay Felker and Mary McGrory.

Looking around at the cast of all-stars, sports columnist David Israel observed, "You wanted to be sprinkled with that stardust."

The parade of their testimonials eventually borders on the gaudy ("He really is a visionary," his wife, Keven, is called upon to report), and the book sometimes seems too full of itself. For instance, we learn more about his marital issues than may be necessary. But he also doesn't hide his conflicts with his bosses, such as Publisher Joe Allbritton of the Washington Star. At one point, Allbritton became so exasperated that he moved to take his own name--the publisher's name!--off the masthead, complaining, "Bellows never tells me anything."

Bellows appreciates that his unflinching personality is both a gift and a curse. "I paid a price for my stubbornness," he writes about the demise of the Star. "Maybe if I'd had a little more polish, if I'd compromised a little more...I could have made it work."

Therein lies the great mystery of "The Last Editor." How did an undeniably brilliant editor, surrounded by talent and blessed with resources, fail so often? Is it simply that markets no longer support second-place media? Or is there something we don't understand about attracting today's consumers?

In one of the book's most exquisite scenes, Bellows gains an audience with media mogul William Paley, having heard that Paley has "some great ideas" for saving the sinking Herald Tribune. Bellows is shocked when Paley merely advises blithely, "You ought to make the paper so interesting that people demand to buy it."

The paper is interesting, Bellows objects. "That's your mistake," Paley answers with Yoda-like opaqueness. "If it was as interesting as you say it is, people would be demanding it and your problems would go away.... If you double your circulation, things will be a lot better."

Ah, yes, just double the circulation. But how? You have to love Bellows' go-down-fighting spirit, but why must he go down at all? Bellows is optimistic, and his book is inspirational but a little haunting. We want to believe that if you do irresistible journalism, people will come. Yet even for Bellows, not enough people came. Maybe Paley was right, and we need a quantum leap in our notion of what irresistible journalism really is.