Best in the Business   

Some new categories, some new winners, some old favorites and some extremely narrow victories characterized this year's "Best in the Business" poll.

Two first-time winners are at the forefront of the news industry's electronic revolution. AJR readers named Wired, the San Francisco-based monthly that celebrates cyberspace, the magazine to watch for the rest of the decade. And in the new category of best online news and information service, America Online took top honors.

Voters also brought back several past winners for more accolades. Mother Jones was singled out as best magazine for investigative reporting, as it was five years ago, the only other time the category has been used. Molly Ivins, who won two awards in 1993, was voted best nationally syndicated columnist. And "60 Minutes" is yet again the best TV newsmagazine.

A number of the categories were almost too close to call.

The tightest print category was best newspaper for investigative journalism. The Wall Street Journal nipped the Philadelphia Inquirer by only two votes and the Washington Post by three votes. The Post won this category when it was included in 1993 and 1990. Meanwhile, the Post's Thomas Boswell was named best newspaper sports columnist, beating Newsday's Mike Lupica by seven votes. Boswell also won the award in 1987 and 1985. In the newspaper to watch category, the San Jose Mercury News bested the Atlanta Journal and Constitution by only 10 votes.

Two broadcast categories also featured neck-and-neck finishes. Ted Koppel edged Bill Moyers by three votes as the most thought-provoking TV news commentator. Koppel won similar honors in 1993, 1987 and 1985. Moyers, who took the top spot for most provocative TV commentator in 1986, this year was named best White House press secretary of all time. "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" garnered nine more votes than ABC's "World News Tonight" for the title of best national TV nightly newscast. Robin and Jim won two awards in 1993 and another in 1989.

A note on methodology: AJR selected the categories--which vary somewhat from year to year--and a board of nominators (see page 35), who in turn chose the candidates. Nominators were not permitted to pick candidates who work for their organizations. AJR then mailed ballots to 5,000 randomly selected readers; 20 percent replied.

"Our beat is the best beat anyone can have today," says Louis Rossetto, 45, editor and publisher of Wired.

The two-year-old magazine, whose focus is the digital revolution, was started on a shoestring by Rossetto and its president, Jane Metcalfe. Today it has a circulation of 160,000.

"Our mission is to look out over the horizon and come back with an outline of the future," Rossetto says. "We're in the predictions business and we have to take risks about what's coming."

Rossetto likens magazines to performance art and wants Wired to push the boundaries of its medium. Its 9-inch by 10-3/4 inch format is bursting with Day-Glo color and layouts featuring various typefaces, type sizes and column widths.

The magazine's staff of 65 stays on top of new cyberspace developments with the help of a crew of contributors and fellow travellers who E-mail tidbits and comments.

Finding qualified contributors isn't easy. "They need to be techno-savvy, 'Net savvy and have a sense of interactivity and connection to the online world. They need to know about business, politics and culture. They also need to be good journalists foremost and have some good literary skills," says Rossetto. "That's not a common set of skills."

Rossetto earned a masters degree in finance and marketing from Columbia University, and "then tried very hard to be a novelist and a freelance writer." He ended up wandering around the world, settling for a time in the Netherlands where he founded a computer publication and helped launch a men's lifestyle magazine.

Last October Wired launched HotWired, an online service combining electronic publishing with the interactive features of personal computers.

Looking ahead, Rossetto envisions Wired and HotWired as components of a media company that will expand in new directions, including books and perhaps television: "I see Wired filling out to be a pretty focused small media company doing innovative things."

Best newspaper for investigative journalism: Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger, 52, considers investigative reporting an integral part of every reporter's beat.

This emphasis, says Steiger, reflects the Journal's general approach to news coverage. First, "any reporter is encouraged to go for a big story," he says. Second, "reporters on this paper as much as any paper I know are encouraged to break news. We are a paper of record for American business, but we are also determined to get as much news as we can first."

When it comes to investigative reporting, "my sense of that tradition and what I've tried to carry forward and intensify is that any reporter on this newspaper should be capable of pursuing and getting into the paper a high-impact, surprising, dramatic story." After identifying such stories, Steiger says he gives his reporters the necessary time to do them.

Steiger, the paper's top-ranking editor, credits John Brecher, the editor responsible for front page features, for making these stories "a very high priority."

Last year the Journal reported on sexual harassment in the securities industry, an electronics company that inflated its computer marketing expenses to boost profit figures, an honor student striving to succeed in a poorly funded Washington, D.C., public school, and pressures on women to breast-feed their children.

Steiger has produced his own share of award-winning reporting, starting at the Journal in San Francisco in 1966 after graduating from Yale. He was lured away by the Los Angeles Times in 1968, but came back to the Journal in 1983 as an assistant managing editor, moving up the ladder to his current position in 1991.

Steiger says the paper will continue to make investigative stories a high priority. "We had a very strong year for this kind of story. But obviously you can't force it. There's nothing worse than running a story you put a lot of effort into that doesn't come off."

Best nationally syndicated columnist: Molly Ivins

For a syndicated columnist like Molly Ivins, 50, the recent political upheaval in Texas and elsewhere is like a bowl of fresh salsa--tangy and tantalizing. "It's always more fun to be in the opposition if you're a political writer," she says.

Ivins' quick wit, sharp tongue and writing talent keep her a journalism luminary while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram pays her to opine in columns about Texas politics and what she calls "other bizarre happenings."

It seems as if Ivins is always working. She writes three columns a week and is syndicated in nearly 200 newspapers. She does occasional commentary for National Public Radio and the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," although she professes to like radio better than television because "you don't have to worry about how you look." She also does freelance work for a number of magazines.

Ivins believes the bumpy political landscape where she grazes for fodder may be one reason people like what she writes.

"Our political debate these days is unpleasant and polarized," she says. "I think that anybody who can make you laugh about politics these days is doing a public service."

The Houston native who graduated from Smith and got a masters in journalism from Columbia University plunged into journalism as "the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle." She says she worked her way up to "sewer editor" when she "wrote a number of gripping stories about street closings."

From there it was on to the Minneapolis Tribune, Texas Observer and New York Times. In February 1982 she returned to Texas, a move she says "may indicate a masochistic streak," to be a political columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald. Ten years later, after the paper went under, she moved to the Star-Telegram.

The more she writes and talks, the more awards she seems to accumulate. What does she do with them? "I use them as trivets," she says. "It's the only thing awards are good for, to set hot dishes on them."

Best White House press secretary (ever): Bill Moyers

Asking Bill Moyers, 60, to recall his days as a White House press secretary, he says, "is like asking a survivor of the Civil War if Pickett's Charge was the best battle."

Moyers was working for Vice President Lyndon Johnson in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Suddenly, Moyers and his boss found themselves propelled "into a world we hadn't expected to occupy."

A few years later, when Johnson's press secretary, George Reedy, stepped down, Moyers didn't covet the job. As a special assistant to the president, he was content to work on legislative and policy issues. But once Johnson decided to appoint Moyers, his only option was to "salute and do it."

Born in Oklahoma and raised in Texas, Moyers started out as a cub reporter on the Marshall News Messenger at age 16.

After becoming White House press secretary, he got some advice from Pierre Salinger, who had played the same role for Kennedy. Salinger warned that reporters weren't very tolerant of long pauses between questions and the press secretary's responses. The answer: cigars. "If you light a cigar, they will honor the time it takes you to do the deed," Moyers says. "I took up smoking as a cover."

Moyers left the White House in 1967 to become publisher of Newsday. He says he didn't pine to return to government because he felt passionate about other endeavors, including journalism. He has served as senior news analyst for the "CBS Evening News" and has produced highly acclaimed series for public television. In 1986 he formed an independent production company, Public Affairs Television, with his wife, Judith Davidson, the company's president.

Moyers recently decided to return to network TV as a senior news analyst for NBC, where he will provide commentary on the nightly news.

As for his days jousting with the White House press, Moyers says, "I liked being in the coliseum with the lions. It was good combat every day."

Best TV newsmagazine: 60 Minutes

When Mike Wallace was working as a correspondent for CBS in the late 1960s, he was offered two jobs: He could become presidential candidate Richard Nixon's press secretary or cohost a new TV newsmagazine show.

"Was I lucky?" sighs the feisty 76-year-old veteran newsman.

CBS' "60 Minutes" debuted on September 24, 1968, with Wallace and Harry Reasoner as the principal reporters and Don Hewitt as executive producer. For the first show they set up TV cameras in hotel rooms to record the families of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey as their party conventions nominated them for president.

The first night's competition was a spy thriller on NBC and a musical comedy on ABC. "60 Minutes" came in third in the ratings. "In the early days," Wallace says, "we were a loss leader."

The show shifted to different nights before settling in its permanent 7 p.m. Sunday night home, a slot that had been relegated to children's programming or news. The move proved to be a stroke of genius. By the time other networks tried to compete, the show was entrenched. "We had almost become 'appointment television' by then," Wallace says.

It took "60 Minutes" 10 years to finish in the Nielsen top 10 ratings, and two more years before it would be ranked number one. Wallace says the benchmark for the show and its audience growth was the 1973 oil embargo "when there was no gas on Sunday afternoon to visit grandma." Now in its 27th season, the newsmagazine attracts more than 31 million viewers.

"This is the only magazine I know on television, maybe even print or radio, that has never done a story on O.J. Simpson," says Wallace, who began as a radio newswriter and broadcaster in Chicago in the 1940s. "That in a strange way speaks to the difference between '60 Minutes' and other newsmagazine shows. We made our mark in investigation."

Wallace has no plans of retiring--he signed a contract that runs until he's 80. "Can you think of a better job in journalism?" he asks. "You can go any place in the world, do any story you want, have enough time to put it together and enough time on the air to tell it."

Most thoughtful news and public affairs commentator: Ted Koppel

Ask ABC's Ted Koppel to describe a typical viewer of his late-night news program "Nightline," and he says with a chuckle, "I haven't got a clue."

Surveys tell him that his audience is skewed toward well-educated, older, upscale viewers. While these may not be the demographics that excite Madison Avenue, Koppel, 55, doesn't have to worry. His half-hour show, which airs weekday evenings at 11:35 on the East Coast, has healthy ratings for its time slot.

It's not that competition isn't fierce from late-night rivals David Letterman and Jay Leno. But Koppel says that people who want to understand the day's important news events aren't going to learn much from the two entertainment shows. Conversely, he says, "they're also not going to get many laughs on 'Nightline.' "

Koppel's staff of 40 does try to plan and report stories in advance. But often late-breaking news forces abrupt changes just hours before airtime. "You just have to dump it," Koppel says.

"Nightline" was created in 1980 to follow the Iran hostage crisis. Without that need for ongoing coverage, Koppel says the show probably wouldn't have been launched then.

Before "Nightline," Koppel had been ABC News' chief diplomatic correspondent since 1971, and had anchored the "ABC Saturday Night News" from 1975 through 1977. A native of Lancashire, England, Koppel joined ABC in New York in 1963 as a general assignment reporter.

Koppel says the program's challenge has been to find innovative approaches. In recent years, "Nightline" has established an investigative unit and experimented with a variety of new formats, including a day-in-the-life of political candidates.

Nightline has also devoted programs to chess, cartoons and poetry, and even used ballet dancers to demonstrate the effect of cocaine on the brain. Says Koppel, "There truly is not a subject on earth we cannot cover."

Newspaper to watch during the late 1990s: San Jose Mercury News

"There is no model for the newspaper we need to publish," Jerry Ceppos, 48, told readers of the San Jose Mercury News a few days after taking over as executive editor on January 9. In a lengthy column, Ceppos spelled out his criteria for the newspaper of the future and his plans to implement them.

The paper's longtime tradition of informing and educating readers, and reporting fairly and accurately, will not change under his stewardship, he says. But other things will. "Our entire staff understands the follies of sticking only to traditional journalism," says Ceppos, who has worked at the Knight-Ridder paper for 14 years.

Ceppos encourages newspapers to embrace public journalism, to "go a step further than they traditionally have by helping to solve a community's problems."

To foster greater community input, Ceppos plans to invite readers to visit the newsroom and attend the editors' front page conference. He will also name a full time reader representative.

"I think we can become the only paper I know of that will embrace new ideas without throwing out our watchdog role," says Ceppos.

A journalism graduate of the University of Maryland, Ceppos joined Knight-Ridder in 1972 as Miami editor of the Knight News Wire. As executive editor, Ceppos replaces Bob Ingle, 55, who held the post since 1981. Ingle, who first joined Knight-Ridder in 1962 as a copy editor at the Miami Herald, is now the company's vice president for new media. He's responsible for initiating and managing all new media ventures, including a company-wide online strategy.

This is an area close to Ingle's heart. He proposed and developed Mercury Center, the San Jose paper's online information service launched in 1993.

"People are increasingly making up their own media mix, picking and choosing," he says. "The traditional print newspaper is still very much in that mix, but not alone as it once was."

Best recent nonfiction book about the news media: "Media Circus," by Howard Kurtz

Since his book poked and prodded the industry to reinvent itself, Howard Kurtz steeled himself for brickbats and barbs.

"To my surprise," he says, "the book touched a nerve." Much of the reaction came from people who said he had articulated their own frustrations about being in the news business.

Nor did he expect journalism professors across the country to make the book mandatory reading. "It's odd to think that this thing I've written has now become homework," he says.

First published in 1993, a revised edition in paperback with a new chapter about President Clinton was issued in May 1994. Kurtz, 41, started the book about a year after he took over the Post's media beat in 1990.

"I felt there was a lot of soul-searching going on in the newspaper business," he says. "A lot of people are depressed about what we are becoming--more tabloid, more celebrity-obsessed, more filled with rumor-mongering."

It took Kurtz nearly two years to write "Media Circus," working at night on a computer in his basement. Now he's writing his second book, on television.

Kurtz thinks the Clinton presidency has changed the dynamics of political debate. Conservatives write him to complain that the media are too soft on the president, while liberals urge the press to give Clinton a break. "Now that we've found a Democratic president to beat up on," Kurtz says, "both sides are unhappy." In any case, he adds, "there are a lot of legitimate reasons for people to be angry at the press," which he believes can be arrogant and slow to acknowledge its mistakes.

With Republicans now in control of Congress, "the real test for the press," he says, "is to see if we can grapple seriously with conservative ideas and not just treat people like Newt Gingrich as Scrooge-like caricatures."

Best sports columnist: Thomas Boswell

"If you just want to write about final scores, then this was a terrible year to be a sportswriter," says Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, referring to the baseball strike and the abbreviated hockey season. "I wouldn't want every year to be like this one."

But for Boswell, 47, who has tracked baseball for 20 of his 25 years at the Post, the spat between the national pastime's owners and players offered him a fresh way to write about familiar faces and reveal their characters in a crisis.

The shortened season also let him show off the benefits of longevity; he still had plenty to write about. As he puts it, he has "more institutional memory than 95 percent of the people involved in the strike."

"I've always believed we have a society with a lot of people who are instant experts and people who comment freely without staying in one place long enough," he says. "I've tried to stay in one place long enough to know about baseball, football, golf and local Washington sports."

Boswell grew up in Washington, D.C., where both his parents worked at the Library of Congress. When he was 12, his father snuck him into the library stacks where he savored every baseball book ever written.

"I've loved and adored every American sport and I'm mediocre at all of them," he says, adding he's tried everything from golf to pool to darts.

Boswell has had better luck in journalism. After graduating from Amherst in 1969, a knee injury kept him from going to Vietnam. One day he walked into the Post and professed his love for sports and his willingness to do any job. He was hired for the 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. "lobster shift" on the sports desk and moved up from there.

In 1984, he shifted from reporter to columnist. He appreciates the opportunity to speak his mind in print and get paid for it. In January Boswell wrote a tough column chastising baseball and hockey owners and players. But, he added, it's not just the insiders who are to blame: "We as fans and we in the media have truly created our own monsters."

Best wire service (other than AP): Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service

Having access to copy from world-class newspapers to create a supplemental news service "is akin to having a Stradivarius to make music," says Al Leeds, president of LATWP.

Still, the mechanics of selecting, editing and transmitting news reports across time zones to 574 clients with 82 million readers in 51 countries isn't an effortless process. On a typical day Leeds' service sends out 109 stories, or 83,000 words--enough for a good-sized novel.

"A supplemental news service is only as strong as the help it gets from its contributing newsrooms," says Leeds, 43, who is entering his sixth year at the news service after 10 years with the Washington Post Writers Group syndicate. The news service has five full time people in Washington, nine in Los Angeles and one in New York at Newsday, plus part time support.

The news service runs about one-third of its stories from the Post, a third from the Los Angeles Times and the rest from other Times Mirror papers, such as Newsday, the Sun in Baltimore and the Hartford Courant.

Since the papers supplying the copy often cover the same stories, the news service often must choose between crafting a new version by combining articles or using one paper's piece. Given that "the editing time is the largest expense item," says Leeds, "more and more we are going with the first version of a story..[from] whoever gets it in first."

The LATWP was started in 1962 by Times Publisher Otis Chandler and Post Publisher Philip Graham who saw a news service as a way to extend the reach of each paper and generate revenue.

Leeds says his editors are keenly aware of reporters' sensitivities about having their copy altered. He says reporters are understanding when cuts are required or edits made. Seeing their byline usually helps, Leeds adds. And so does one other news service dictum: "We never change the lead."

Best magazine for investigative journalism: Mother Jones

"Our biggest specialty over our 19 years has been exposés of what is legal but morally reprehensible," says Jeffrey Klein, 47, editor in chief of Mother Jones, a San Francisco-based bimonthly. MoJo has plumbed subjects from Pintos to fisheries to breast cancer research, the CIA and Newt Gingrich.

"We're trying to do a deeper level of exposé than what's simply 'gotcha' stuff," he says, adding that he sees a decline in exposés "that bring moral scrutiny on companies and governments."

He attributes the decrease in investigative reporting to several factors. The recent recession prompted papers to lay off investigative reporters or reassign them to other beats. In addition, Klein cites the potential for investigative reporting to offend. "There are some places that have backbone," he says. But there also is a discomfort level that he dubs the Ceausescu phenomenon. "Papers are willing to expose [the late Romanian dictator] Nicolae Ceausescu, but the closer you get to the retail advertisers in your own market the more cowardly you become."

Klein was one of the magazine's founding editors and worked there from 1976 to 1981. He left to become editor in chief of San Francisco magazine and then cofounded West, the San Jose Mercury News' Sunday magazine. He returned to Mother Jones in 1992.

Over the years he has watched MoJo grow from a more "juvenile" magazine that projected "idealistic but impossible alternatives" into a publication that "probably feels more of an obligation to propose realistic alternatives."

Today, the magazine's circulation is 120,000, less than half what it was at its apogee about a decade ago. Klein attributes the decline to problems faced by general interest magazines, the increasing cynicism about politics and the fact that "we just don't have a hell of a lot of capital."

He characterizes his readers as children of the counterculture who are now professionals in their mid-40s. "They're idealists," he says

Best online news and information service: America Online

As electronic services proliferate, cyberspace entrepreneurs like Steven Case predict a revolution for journalism.

Case, 36, president and CEO of America Online, the nation's fastest growing consumer online service, believes these shifts will reach far beyond the ability of consumers to select their own news and will require the media to create new delivery options.

Case likens the fast-paced world of national electronic services to a petri dish because of its potential to generate news and story ideas. "What is happening on electronic services is the first wave of what you will read in the papers a week later," he says.

No less important, he adds, are the changes already visible as more reporters use electronic services as a resource tool, to search for information, locate experts or post messages on electronic bulletin boards to find potential sources.

"The change in terms of the journalism process itself is the more fundamental change," Case says, because "you're shifting the relationship [among] readers and reporters and editors and making it a fuzzy, more participatory process."

Case expects America Online, which he cofounded in 1985, to have 3 million subscribers by the end of 1995. The service carries copy from the New York Times, the Knight-Ridder wire, the Chicago Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News, as well as nearly 50 magazines.

Case, who graduated with a political science degree from Williams College, once dreamed of becoming a muckraking reporter. He was also interested in business and marketing; the two paths converged after he bought his first computer in 1982 and hooked up to a primitive online service.

He found it a "magical" experience to access information and people all over the world. One day, he thought, this would become a vital new medium. It looks like he had a point.

Best national TV nightly newscast: MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

"We live increasingly in a time of 'gotcha' journalism," says Robert "Robin" MacNeil, coanchor of the "MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour." "This is also a time of cheap shots."

The evening news show he coanchors with Jim Lehrer five nights a week is interested in neither, MacNeil says. "It's not because we're holier than thou or have taken a vow of chastity." Rather it's because he and Lehrer believe there is a place for journalism that takes public issues seriously.

In recent years, as more television seems tinged with tabloiditis, the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" has seen its audience grow. "We know what our audience appears to want or they would go away," MacNeil says. "They appear to want a more quiet, thoughtful, civilized, slower approach to the news. They don't need it as zippy and vigorous and violent and visually exciting and gimmicky as a lot of the commercial product is."

Adds Lehrer: "As the rest of TV moves in a different direction than ours, we become increasingly the only place you can go for our type of television." Public television, says MacNeil, affords the luxury of creating interesting programs that don't have to win a ratings competition.

This October, Lehrer, 60, and MacNeil, 64, will end 20 years as evening news partners, including 11 seasons coanchoring the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour." MacNeil will leave the show to oversee other programming for MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. The evening news show will become "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

Both say they will miss their 30 to 40 conversations a day on a telephone line that links MacNeil's New York office to Lehrer's in Northern Virginia.

They'll have to find other ways to stay in touch. Perhaps, says MacNeil, "we can go on vacation together."

Best TV network for investigative journalism: ABC News

"There is some body of opinion that viewers today can't tell the difference between Oprah Winfrey and Ted Koppel," ABC News President Roone Arledge, 63, says.

This view might appear to rattle a man who has spent more than 40 years in television, a good chunk of it in news. But Arledge is comforted by other research that shows that through the maze of all the TV tabloid shows, people do know the difference between the networks, local stations and syndicated programs.

Since Arledge took the helm of ABC News in 1977, the network's stable of news programs, along with investigative reporting, has expanded to "World News Tonight," "Nightline," "20/20," "This Week with David Brinkley," "PrimeTime Live," "Day One," "World News This Morning," "World News Now" and assorted specials.

Arledge believes investigative reporting is an area where the major TV news organizations, and ABC in particular, can shine. "The ability to do good solid investigative reporting today goes back to the basic strength of an organization...," he says. "You have to be financially sound and prosperous to invest in foreign coverage or whatever it is. It clearly is more expensive to do a major six-month investigation than it is to do a profile of someone.

"Almost anybody can do a story about a gas station that rips your car off or something scandalous about the environment. If you are going to be a major news organization, you should try as much as possible to spend your time on worthy targets."

Arledge's interest in broadcast journalism began after he graduated from Columbia University in 1952 and went to work for the Dumont Network, an early TV network. Then came six years in production jobs at NBC. In 1960 he joined ABC and rose to become president of ABC Sports in 1968. Nine years later he was running the news division.

In recent years Arledge has seen TV become more crowded with newsmagazines. "I think there are too many magazine shows," he says. "The good will survive and the weaker ones will not. It's like having too many newspapers in one town. Not all of them will prosper."

Best newspaper ownership: Knight-Ridder, Inc.

"Everybody here involved in making decisions feels that quality journalism is something that is absolutely critical to the success of this company," says P. Anthony Ridder, president of Knight-Ridder, Inc.

Ridder, 54, says that won't change as he and Knight-Ridder's Chairman and CEO James K. Batten, 59, gear up to guide the nation's second largest newspaper company through the changing landscape of news delivery.

The two executives say Knight-Ridder is shifting its priorities away from newspaper acquisitions in order to explore new ways to package, sell and deliver information. "We see the electronic delivery of newspaper content as a developing business as well," Ridder says.

"The truth is, as a company we are disproportionately newspaper in our composition," adds Batten. "There is going to be a need to focus on other ways to get information out and around the country."

They say their approach will not rule out additions to the company's roster of 29 newspapers, especially in growth areas. "The two of us love newspapers," Batten says. "We were both raised that way. We would like to add more newspapers at some point. But our priority at the moment is non-newspaper acquisitions."

Batten, who has been with the Miami-based company for more than three decades, got his first reporting job out of college with the Charlotte Observer in 1957. He earned a masters in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and completed the advanced management program at Harvard Business School in tandem with his steadily advancing career at Knight-Ridder.

He views his company as one firmly committed to minimizing politics in its operations.

"At Knight-Ridder," he says, "you get ahead on the basis on your contributions and hard work, and not who you know."