That question was on the lips of employees at the Los Angeles Times when Fuller spoke to them in March. Tribune had just revealed that it would swallow Times Mirror, the L.A. newspaper’s parent company. Anxious staffers peppered Fuller with questions. Will you change the paper’s name? Will there be layoffs to improve profits? Some of the fear was justified. Last year the Times was humiliated after the paper published a magazine section about L.A.’s new Staples Center, and split the advertising revenues with the owners of the sports arena. In April, Fuller sacked the publisher and the editor of the Times, both of whom had been tainted by the fiasco.
But the questions swirling around Fuller haven’t stopped. Here’s the most crucial. Does a cerebral ex-reporter and novelist have the business savvy and toughness to fix the underachieving Times Mirror papers? Fuller, 53, certainly doesn’t look the part of a heartless suit from headquarters. He’s bearded, soft-spoken and rarely wears a tie. Yet under Fuller, Tribune’s papers have been the most lucrative in the industry, with profit margins much higher than Times Mirror’s. The deal now makes him one of the most influential newspaper executives in the country. When the merger becomes final this summer, Tribune’s revenues will trail only Gannett, the nation’s largest chain; Tribune Co. will have papers or broadcast stations in 18 of the nation’s 30 largest markets, including the Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant and New York’s Newsday. Not that he plans to meddle from afar but, as Fuller has joked to Times Mirror employees, “You have to suffer with the fact that an ex-editor runs our publishing division.”
Although it’s a cliche that Fuller would likely edit out of a story, newspapers are in his blood. The son of a Chicago Tribune financial editor, he joined the paper as a 16-year-old copy boy. As a young police reporter, Fuller saw the seamy side of life on Chicago’s South Side. He was drafted and wrote for Stars and Stripes in Vietnam. Later, at Yale Law School, he worked in a mock-trial group with classmates Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton (the three are still cordial but “We didn’t endorse him,” Fuller adds). Returning to the Trib, he shot up from cityside reporter to chief of the editorial pages to editor of the paper. Along the way, he earned a Pulitzer for his editorials on constitutional issues. He’s also the author of seven well-reviewed books; The New York Times called “Fragments,” a Vietnam novel, “elegantly executed.” He comes to work at 6 a.m. to squeeze in an hour of book-writing, which he does in pencil, an old habit he won’t break. And he’s an accomplished musician; he still wishes he’d been good enough to make a living as a jazz trombonist, and now plays piano.
But Fuller is making his real mark in business. In 1993 he left the newsroom to become a full-time exec, moving, he says dryly, to “the dark side” of the business. The switch was comfortable, Fuller says, because it let him improve Tribune’s newspapers by pushing them into new technologies. He led the then revolutionary efforts to put print journalists’ best work on TV and the Internet. Those innovations upset reporters, many of whom didn’t like being viewed as “content providers” for other Tribune Co. news outlets.
Over time, though, Tribune has perfected the art of sharing good stories among its far-flung properties. Before the merger, the company owned 22 TV stations, four radio stations, plus stakes in AOL and several other Internet companies. Last year, for example, two Chicago Tribune reporters produced extraordinary stories that showed how mistakes in the legal system had wrongly put several men on death row in Illinois. Those stories quickly appeared on the company’s Internet site. Then the newspaper, which has its own nine-person TV production staff, turned the print series into a story for Tribune-owned television stations. The stories got huge play, and the company saved money by relaunching them from other news platforms.
Fuller won’t say much about his plans for Times Mirror. But he’ll surely bring those papers into the age of synergies–a word Fuller loathes. (“Mama didn’t raise me to be the poster boy for a semi-Greek word,” he says.) High on Fuller’s agenda is getting television cameras into the newsrooms of the L.A. Times and Newsday.
Still, Fuller’s tenure in Chicago has been marked by grumbles in the newsroom that, given its profitability and ambitions, he has kept the Tribune staff too lean. (Fuller responds that editorial head count grew 12 percent in the last decade, to about 700.) Fuller’s defenders say he may change Times Mirror, but for the better. “Jack worries about newspapers,” says Lois Wille, a former Tribune editor. “He thinks the best way to keep them strong is to make sure they’re profitable.” As Fuller sets out to fix Times Mirror, the novelist in him ought to know how to write a happy ending.
