Moorhouse Brought Vision, Courage to Bakersfield

By: Mark Fitzgerald For decades, just about everybody in Bakersfield had heard whispers about a shadowy cabal of powerful men with secret gay lives who supposedly ran the midsize city in Southern California's San Joaquin Valley, protecting each other as they preyed on teenage boys -- victims who occasionally exacted a deadly revenge.

But while nearly everyone there had heard the legend of the so-called "Lords of Bakersfield" over the years, almost nobody expected to read about it in the hometown paper, The Bakersfield Californian. Yet, there it was on Jan. 19: an eight-page package of articles and photographs laying out in sometimes graphic detail a sordid tale of corruption, pedophilia, and murder that stretches from the 1950s to the present day.

Even more extraordinary was the story the family-owned newspaper told on itself. A long-ago general manager was revealed as a suspected child molester. The Californian's past practice of burying or killing embarrassing stories was documented. And former Publisher Alfred Theodore "Ted" Fritts -- the deceased brother of the current publisher -- was linked to an underage gay prostitute.

In the days that followed "The Lords of Bakersfield" special report, Californian Chairman and Publisher Virginia F. "Ginger" Moorhouse would hear herself repeatedly praised for her courage in throwing open the newspaper's closetful of skeletons. "I think Ginger was a little taken aback by all the people who praised her," says Mike Jenner, Californian vice president and executive editor. "To her, I think, it wasn't an issue of courage, it was what she was supposed to do. So I think she was a little surprised."

Moorhouse was indeed surprised: "To me, it wasn't an act of courage, it was just a right thing to do. If my brother Ted had been alive, he would have encouraged us to do it, too." Yet, the publisher is not unaware of the impact of the "Lords" report: "I think it was kind of a defining piece for our paper."

It is, however, only one of several defining reasons Ginger Moorhouse is E&P's 2003 Publisher of the Year.

Putting Bakersfield on the map

Certainly, the "Lords" special report brought national attention the 71,495-circulation Californian had never before enjoyed. But newspaper-industry observers a few years ago began to take note of the transformation Moorhouse and her team were working on a paper that had long had a poor reputation among its peers.

These days, the family-owned Californian is operated like a paper several times its size. Even before the Readership Institute began promoting the urgency of changing the "defensive culture" of newspapers, the Californian had adopted that as a management mantra. It has institutionalized innovation through efforts such as its "Area 51" brainstorming group. This midsize paper is building its own customer-relationship-management (CRM) database from scratch -- and went outside the newspaper industry to find someone to do it. Even as other newspapers are deferring capital projects, Moorhouse green-lighted $6 million in improvements in the Californian's packaging center, including a new Ferag inserter, as well as a new Internet protocol (IP) telephone system.

And for all the plaudits it earned, "Lords" may not even be the paper's most gutsy editorial effort in the past year.

After all, many of the subjects of the "Lords" package were, to put it plainly, creeps. But last spring, the paper took on a beloved institution: the Kern County Fire Department, whose nationally acclaimed firefighters are among the first ones called wherever wildfires rage in the West. The paper discovered the department was allowing many low-ranking officers to inflate their salaries astronomically with uncontrolled overtime pay.

Public-employee unions called the investigation an invasion of privacy that threatened even the physical security of the families of these firefighting heroes. A boycott was noisily organized, and the county forced the Californian to go to court repeatedly to get pay records. (This month, the paper was vindicated when an appeals court ordered the county to release the records -- and pay the Californian's substantial legal bills.)

"She wants aggressive journalism and is willing to take the heat when it comes," Executive Editor Jenner says.

Newspapers chains nationwide haven't just noticed how much better The Bakersfield Californian has become -- they want to make it their property. "Hardly a week goes by when I don't get a call from someone wanting to buy it," says CEO and President Richard Beene. "It's my duty to pass it on, but she just cuts me off and says, 'No.' I'll say, 'Don't you even want to know who it is making the offer?'"

Not really, Moorhouse says: "No, I would never sell the newspaper. There is no price that is high enough." She raves about their home office in downtown Bakersfield, a Moroccan-style building added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. There are many other reasons for keeping the paper, she says, and two work in the building -- her daughters, Tracey Cowenhoven (who writes editorials for the paper) and Ginny Cowenhoven (who is in marketing). The family, Moorhouse says, "is in the fourth generation of ownership, moving into the fifth generation."

Indeed, according to Ginny, "the thing I find most interesting is, she represents the past and family, but one of the things she emphasizes is the future and growth."

Both of them admire their mother's rise at the Californian. "She's totally at the top of her game now," Tracey says. "She's a great role model."

The Kay corner

The Ginger Moorhouse who now serves as a great role model was not so confident 14 years ago as she awaited an arranged lunch with Katharine Graham, then chairman of the Washington Post Co.

The two women were very much alike. Growing up, neither had ever expected -- nor, more to the point, been expected -- to someday run the family newspaper. Both married and raised children. Yet a family tragedy, the suicide of her husband Philip Graham in August 1963, had thrust a timorous Kay Graham into leadership. Tragedy was striking the Bakersfield newspaper family as well: One after another, Moorhouse's three brothers, anointed to run the Californian, were unable to do so because of suicide, illness, and AIDS.

When the two women met, Graham had long ago emerged from her ordeal to become a towering institution while Moorhouse's leadership had yet to be tested.

"Ginger was very much like Kay Graham -- she didn't have full confidence in herself," recalls George Wilson, CEO and president of the Concord, N.H.-based family group Newspapers of New England. It was Wilson who arranged the meeting, which in many ways was a turning point in Moorhouse's life.

When Wilson met Moorhouse, she was raising three children in a failing marriage and working as a reporter for The Cabinet, an 8,000-circulation weekly in Milford, N.H. Moorhouse had arrived at the paper with almost no journalism credentials outside her bloodline: Previously, she had worked as a kindergarten and physical-education teacher, and once owned a store with horseback-riding gear.

Moorhouse started at the paper with no real plan to turn it into anything more than a way to indulge her love of writing. "She used to say she'd do it for free," says Cabinet Assistant Editor Kathy Cleveland. The two worked together, covering the small-town news of school boards and planning commissions and car crashes. "She was humble and sweet and funny," Cleveland says. "We knew her family connections, but we didn't think she would ever be publisher." She was good at the job, Cleveland adds: Listening to some ambiguous chatter on the police band one day, Moorhouse figured out there had been a murder, and beat all the other news media to the scene.

But events were conspiring to bring her to Bakersfield. Though Moorhouse was never supposed to head the Californian, the newspaper had a long history of women leaders. In 1946, its legendary owner, Alfred Harrell, was succeeded by his widow, Virginia, who in turn was succeeded by her daughter, Bernice Harrell Chipman. Moorhouse's mother, Berenice Fritts Koerber, served as president.

The men of Moorhouse's generation were fated to have shorter tenures. First, her eldest brother, William Fritts, killed himself. Her brother, Donald, became publisher in 1970, but was soon diagnosed with Huntington's Disease. As his health deteriorated, leadership eventually passed to her youngest brother, Ted, who figured in the "Lords" special report. He left the paper in 1986 and sold his stake back to the family a few years later. In 1997, at age 50, Ted would die of AIDS complications in San Diego.

Watching from across the country in New Hampshire, Moorhouse says now, "I began to realize, 'Well, I guess I'm the one.'"

Though she was going through a divorce and working at The Cabinet, she began pursuing a master's degree in business administration on weekends and in the evenings. Moorhouse was getting worried, George Wilson recalls: "The [Californian] had absentee owners, and what she was seeing was a newspaper that had been in the family for a long, long time and was going to be sold. The lawyers were swarming, and the newspaper wasn't very good." She sought out Wilson for advice, peppering him with questions about newspaper operations during lunch meetings every couple of weeks.

One question came up repeatedly, Wilson says: "She'd say, 'Who should I talk to?'"

Well, Kay Graham, for one. "She was great," Moorhouse says, and even now a certain note of relief sounds in her voice. "She was very adamant. She said it's very important to be there and be involved. You can't be an off-site owner, she said. ... She was very encouraging of [my] going back and putting a family stamp on the business."

Moorhouse didn't go back immediately, though. In 1989, she was elected chairman and president, and soon afterward she took the title of publisher. But she had remarried and had a son in high school (Peter Cowenhoven, who now lives in Boston), so she stayed a little longer in New Hampshire.

The family at the family paper

A dysfunctional newspaper awaited her arrival, according to Wilson, who joined the company's board of directors: "Morale was terrible. Nobody talked to anybody."

CEO Beene, one of Moorhouse's first hires, recalls the paper when he arrived as executive editor: "What I saw was a kind of lethargic, underachieving ... lazy newsroom. And that attitude kind of affected the whole culture of the paper, because there hadn't been a family member on board for some time. And the paper had kind of slipped." Some veteran managers, who Californian executives say had confused their employment at a family newspaper with a belief that they were family members, were shown the door. "We're pretty tough on people," Beene says. "We'll let the slow performers go, and she'll make those tough decisions. But, on the other hand, we richly reward the good people."

Moorhouse scored her first success attracting a strong executive team, Wilson says: "Getting people who were willing to work at The Bakersfield Californian -- that was the hardest thing. Back then, the reputation of the paper wasn't very good."

Yet, Moorhouse herself says when she finally moved to the paper in 1994, the transition was very smooth. "It was seamless," she recalls, "it felt like coming home." One big reason why is her philosophy of management: "Hire bright people, pay them as much as you can, and let them go." She says she had no desire to be a micromanager. "You can see from my resume that I don't have the editorial experience, the financial experience," she explains. "I know just enough to be dangerous, I guess -- but the people here understand our vision, and run with it and make a difference themselves."

Labor relations were never as fractious as some executives portray them -- nor as trouble-free now as they'd like people to believe, says Steve Swenson, president of the local unit of The Newspaper Guild and a 24-year employee of the Californian. But he adds that Moorhouse is a "peacemaker," and notes that -- at a time of bitter newspaper labor negotiations up and down the West Coast -- the current newsroom contract was negotiated last year in an astonishing 10 days. "That's a level of cooperation between union and newspaper that has to come from the top," Swenson says.

No silos here

Californian management, however, is anything but a top-down affair. Executives say Moorhouse's management style is collegial in a way they've never experienced before. "This is my seventh newspaper," Beene says, "and I've worked for some people I hold in great esteem. But Ginger Moorhouse is in a class of her own." Executive Editor Jenner says Moorhouse approaches managers more as a peer than a boss.

Moorhouse also can be direct. Jenner recalls that shortly after he was promoted to executive editor, Moorhouse asked him to stop by her office. "After exchanging pleasantries," Jenner says, "she asked me a simple question: 'Are we excellent?' I told her I thought we were pretty good a lot of the time, and occasionally very good, but I couldn't answer with a 'Yes.' She then asked me to figure out what it would take to become excellent."

Moorhouse came to the paper determined to break down its "silos" -- MBA-speak for self-contained departments that won't have anything to do with other departments in a business. "Changing culture, that's huge," Moorhouse says, and, as they also say these days in MBA classes, Californian executives are clearly drinking the Kool-Aid. They talk of acting as if they are the owners, of "horizontal" management, and of looking out for the interest of the entire paper, not just their departments.

As occupants of the executive suite describe it, the division of labor is clear: Moorhouse considers the big picture, and managers take it from there. "She's looking down the road not only to the fifth generation -- her kids -- but their kids, too," Beene says. "She wants this to last for another four generations."

To ensure that, Moorhouse has created several in-house structures to focus on innovation and long-range plans: "In this business, where you're putting out a product every day, it's very hard to think of doing things for the future, for 10 or 15 years out."

Innovation at the Californian can be both large and small in scale. A couple of years ago, for instance, the paper budgeted $100,000 to fund the brainstorming group called "Area 51," after the Nevada site that so intrigues believers in aliens from outer space. Their mandate was to be "constantly looking out for the future. ... We even got them white lab coats with their names on them," Moorhouse says. "They're our mad scientists."

Other innovation investments are far bigger. The paper is building its own CRM database system -- a virtually unheard-of undertaking for a paper the size of the Californian. Under the direction of Darrell J. Kunken, vice president of strategic marketing and interactive media, the project has recruited researchers from outside the industry, because there was no one in newspapering doing the same thing, CEO Beene says.

Californian ad salespeople are "almost like media buyers" for their accounts as they match up advertisers with readers most apt to buy, Beene says. They devise the best media strategy for advertisers -- which doesn't always mean just the newspaper. "Say an advertiser is doing direct mail," Beene explains. "With this database, we can show them how to do direct mail better -- and we don't do direct mail."

The Californian is also not afraid to look bad for a while. Like the Los Angeles Times -- which attempted a major push into the Bakersfield market with discounted copies about a decade ago -- the Californian is now purposely shrinking its circulation. "For the past year, we have been weaning ourselves off discounting, and watching the number drop," as the newspaper concentrates its efforts on full-value sales in key demographic ZIP codes, Beene says. "Our strategy is get away from the 'rented' cheap circulation that quickly turns to churn."

Margin calls

Moorhouse says she's just following family tradition when she approves reinvestment. "It's never been about the money with this family," she says. "Now, you have to pay attention to business and keep the margins fairly stable because you need to invest in the future."

She is skeptical about recent moves by some families to keep their papers independent by hooking up with nonprofit foundations or institutions. "We work really hard on our margins," she explains, "and assuring that we have a certain profit because we need to invest. I'm really concerned about how you do that with the nonprofit model."

"Family," though, is the key word in her business discussions, colleagues say. "She is ... fiercely determined to keep the paper independent," Beene says. Family considerations also drive her public service. "If you're an owner on-site, it makes a huge difference," Moorhouse says. "You're here for the people, you're here for the community, and you want them to succeed. I'm always telling our people, 'Bakersfield is our middle name.'"

Judith Pratt, who teaches journalism at the California State University at Bakersfield, has both witnessed and experienced that public service. "She has just made the whole operation available as a learning tool," says Pratt, a former employee of the Californian and the adviser to the school paper. "She's helped [the student paper] move from paste-up to digital. But it's not just here -- she's seen everywhere around town. It's just a very different thing when the newspaper is a family down the street."

The family is staying, Moorhouse vows -- and, even in an era of consolidation, she notes that several factors favor continued family ownership. For one thing, it's a remarkably small family: "We don't have 40 cousins and people that are so far outside the business." The family also does not have a history of infighting.

Moorhouse is changing one family tradition -- she's locking up family ownership not only with legal mechanisms but also with more discussion about succession than her generation ever heard. "Was there talk about formal succession? Oh my gosh, no, not at all." But now: "Estate planning takes up a huge part of my time. We've got all these trusts and life-insurance policies to cover any costs of estate taxes. We spent, gosh, a lot of time to make sure the company passes down to the next generation."

"I want to say I probably wouldn't be the publisher," says daughter Tracey, the editorial writer, "but you never know. You have to be open to whatever happens."

Over in the marketing department, her sister Ginny says that she is "interested in the brain of the company." She plans to return to school for an MBA. Her mother "wants to leave our professional careers up to us," Ginny says, "but she's also very excited and enthusiastic about us being here."

Clearly, Ginger Moorhouse is thinking long-range, but she also has a more immediate task: This summer, the sister who was never expected to get very involved in the family newspaper will become the president of the California Newspaper Publishers Association. "It's funny," she says, "how life is."
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