Moroney Named Publisher of the Year by 'E&P'

By: Mark Fitzgerald Visitors who haven't been to the publisher's office of The Dallas Morning News lately wouldn't recognize the place. The dark wood paneling that gave a hushed, clubby feel to the room has been painted bright white. A similar shade of wall-to-wall carpeting has replaced the muted, rich pile of its predecessor. Most strikingly, the publisher's massive mahogany desk ? more reminiscent of an aircraft carrier than a workspace ? has been supplanted by a far more modest model. "It's the smallest one I could find," James M. Moroney III says with a sheepish smile.

If Morning News Publisher and CEO Moroney is only now getting around to redecorating his office, it's because he's spent his first 27 months on the job shaking the newspaper to its foundation. His effort to change the very culture of the newspaper paid off with several remarkable achievements in 2003 that earned Jim Moroney the distinction of E&P's 2004 Publisher of the Year.

Moroney's performance is all the more remarkable considering the challenges that faced him when he was appointed publisher in June 2001. For one thing, it was the worst possible time for anyone to take charge of the Morning News. The paper had been hurting since 2000 because of the collapse of the locally vital telecom sector, and the entire newspaper industry was six months into the long economic swoon that would only accelerate following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

On Oct. 26, 2001, just 150 days after taking the job, Moroney would have to announce the first layoffs in the paper's modern history, firing 73 of the Morning News' approximately 2,500 employees.

To many inside the newspaper, Moroney was also an odd choice for publisher. He is a great-grandson of the paper's legendary founding publisher G.B. Dealey, but if Moroney has newspapering in his blood, he didn't have it on his resume: He took the top job with no experience in newspapers other than delivering them as a kid and working a couple of summers during college at Belo Corp.'s old Dallas printing plant. In his previous 23 years at Belo, Moroney had worked mostly on its broadcasting side, with a couple of stints in the corporate offices. Just before becoming publisher, he created the corporate-wide Internet division, Belo Interactive.

Yet after less than three years under Moroney's leadership, the newspaper now operates with a high-energy dexterity that astonishes even people inside the Morning News ? let alone observers who had come to think of it as a solid but not especially interesting industry player. In a remarkable tour de force that may be unparalleled, the Morning News last fall launched two daily newspapers in just six weeks.

The first paper, the Spanish-language Al D?a, got a traditional and carefully timed launch. The second launch was barely controlled chaos. Last October, American Consolidated Media LLC (ACM) announced that in less than two weeks it would begin publishing a free daily aimed at Dallas young professionals. The Morning News was caught by surprise ? but also ready. The New Products Division that Moroney created had already developed, but shelved, prototypes for a free quick-read tabloid aimed at young readers. Moroney ordered the staff to start working on the paper as if they already had corporate approval.

In the end, the Morning News' aptly-named Quick beat ACM's AM Journal Express to the street by two days.

Quick distributed 70,000 copies that first day. Within 12 weeks, it was moving 130,000 copies. Says Belo Chairman, President and CEO Robert W. Decherd, "If we had unlimited press capacity, we would be putting even more copies out ? and they would be read, not gathering moisture in the boxes."

While the splashy debuts of Quick and Al D?a have attracted the most industry attention, Moroney also green-lighted what might be considered a third product: the Collin County initiative. In a bid to increase circulation and advertising in an affluent county that the Morning News had mostly neglected, the paper added extra pages of news, sports and entertainment throughout the paper. The idea, Moroney says, is to permanently increase circulation through product improvement, and almost exactly one year later, it appears to be working.

The idea was also to do it on a shoestring. "Jim and Bob [Mong] made that happen with very minimal incremental expense to the Morning News, and significant upside to readers in Collin County," Decherd says. "That takes a lot of leadership, a great deal of the intensity and business skills and instincts that I attributed to Jim early on."



Electric personality

The nearly palpable electric buzz in the Morning News these days radiates first from the top. Ask just about anyone in Belo to describe the publisher and the first description will be "high-energy." Vice President and Managing Editor Stuart Wilk goes even further: "Jim Moroney is like a laser beam on steroids."

The pace he sets can be daunting. "Jim asks a lot of the organization. He's not afraid to ask people to do a lot," says President and Editor Robert W. Mong Jr. Adds Executive Editor Gilbert Bailon, who also heads Al D?a: "There's no doubt it's a stretching of the rubber band, but I think the staff understands that this is urgent business." The Morning News is now competing in both English and Spanish with the well-regarded Fort Worth Star-Telegram, publisher of Diario La Estrella.

Moroney's energy is infectious, colleagues say. Consider, for instance, the task of assembling an entire information technology (IT) infrastructure ? from circulation systems to phone lines ? for two brand-new dailies in a matter of weeks. "From an IT perspective, we went from covered wagons to a space shuttle system in 60 seconds," says Lorie Schrader, vice president of information technology. So are they feeling overworked? "Actually, it was a real high," she says.

The publisher encourages the feeling. A sign on his desk says: "People who don't get carried away, should be."

At a time when many executives had a cautious, crabbed view of newspaper Internet operations, Moroney was willing to put that philosophy into action when he created Belo Interactive. Linda Fisk, the Internet company's vice president/audience development, says that workers worried that their growth and initiatives would always be reined in, subservient to the daily paper. "But Jim always said, let it be as big as it can be, let it flourish as an independent business that forges relationships with other media, and supports the legacy businesses of Belo," Fisk says.

If Moroney is unworried that Web sites will overtake their newspaper partners, it's because he's comfortable with a future that might include no printed newspapers. "There's a tipping point out there. I'm not about to predict when it will be, but if I live as long as the mortality charts would indicate, I'll live to see it," the 47-year-old publisher says. It's not that Moroney believes all the hype about convergence ? he scoffs, for instance, at the notion that most print reporters will actually be outfitted with video as some futurists envision ? but he makes no distinction among news delivery systems. He calls himself "as big a cheerleader" for Belo's dallasnews.com site as for the newspaper itself.



Groomed to zoom

In temperament and background, Jim Moroney represents an emerging generation of newspaper industry leaders ?Dennis FitzSimons at Tribune Co. is another one ? that no longer necessarily climb the ranks by way of the newsroom or even the paper's front office. In a converged environment, there are likely to be more executives coming up from electronic media. For some inside the business, Moroney's championing of print with the launch of two dailies ? and his promises of more niche products to come ? is an encouraging sign for the future of newspapers.

But then, managing both print and electronics is a Moroney family tradition.

Moroney's father, James M. Moroney Jr., also came up the broadcast side of what was then known as AH Belo Corp., and served as publisher of the Morning News from 1980 to 1985. His family and the Decherds were close growing up, but the young cousins Jim and Robert were just enough years apart in age that they didn't hang around together much. Decherd, though, would have a powerful influence on Moroney's subsequent career, steering it in sometimes surprising directions.

Decherd says the attributes that propelled Moroney's rise were there from the start. "When I look at Jim's career," he says, "I see, first and foremost, that he is a very smart man, who is exceedingly well-educated." Moroney came to Belo right after graduating Stanford University in 1978. Family connections, Decherd says, only helped a little: "My dad said, 'You'll get a job here. You'll get a place to start. But after that, you're on your own.'"

It was a time of change. Belo would go public in just a few months and face Wall Street's scrutiny. The Dallas Times-Herald, under aggressive management by Times-Mirror Co., had taken the Morning News' longtime Sunday circulation lead and zeroed in on the weekday lead. Cable television, especially in the smaller markets where Belo had stations, was threatening broadcast TV.

"I guess the first time I was really around Jim was when he was in his early teen years and working as a tour guide at WFAA," recalls Ward Huey, the man Moroney calls his mentor at Belo. Huey, who retired several years ago as head of broadcasting at Belo, said he expected "this young son of one of the principal owners" to be an arrogant so-and-so. He was surprised to find ? then and in the years to come ? just the opposite.

"Jim has always had a dose of humility, and I've always wondered where it came from," Huey says.

Moroney demonstrated that trait at his first Belo job. He was hired as a sales intern for the same WFAA, the Belo flagship in its biggest market with biggest contracts rolling in. Worried that he wasn't learning the fundamentals, he asked for a transfer to one of Belo's smallest operations, KFDM-TV in Beaumont, Texas. "I wanted to understand what selling television is all about," he says.

He learned. In quick succession, he was back at WFAA, then at Belo's New York City-based rep firm Petry Television, then back to WFAA as a local sales manager. By 1982, he was general sales manager at KOTV in Tulsa.

Four years into that position, Moroney got a sudden summons from Dallas. Robert Decherd had a proposition. How would Moroney like to be corporate controller of Belo? It was exactly what Moroney didn't want to hear. "He said I could say no," Moroney recalls with a rueful laugh. "I'm a sales guy, and going to corporate as controller is like becoming Darth Vader. But what am I going to do? If I say no, my career's over. If I say yes, I'm a corporate controller ? and my career's over."



The good soldier

He said yes, as he always would in the years to come. "I really believe if a corporation has been good to you, and Belo has been good to me, that you do what you're asked to do," Moroney says. "I don't know what Belo got out of me as corporate controller, but I got a lot out of being corporate controller."

In 1992, he got the job he always wanted: running a TV station. The position as general manager of KOTV wasn't handed to him this time, though. "It was abject begging at its very best that got me that job," Moroney says. It was a job he wanted forever. Belo gave him four years.

After again answering the corporate call to Dallas, and moving between broadcast and high finance during a Belo growth spurt that included the acquisition of the Providence Journal Co., Moroney went back to the operations side with the founding of Belo Interactive in the summer of 1999.

He approached the start-up with the decisiveness and strategic eye he would use again at the Morning News. From the start he was convinced that the key to monetizing Web sites was requiring user registration. He assigned Linda Fisk to find out everything she could about that then-unfavored practice. "Well, at the time, everybody said it wouldn't work, nobody would register, it would destroy your traffic," Fisk recalls. She says Moroney took that as good news: "He said, 'Even better, we'll get to define [registration] ourselves.'"

The registration form developed for dallasnews.com and other Belo sites shocked Internet gurus. It wasn't the bare-bones registration ? "You know, name, rank and serial number," Fisk says ? that The New York Times and a few other papers asked of users. Belo wanted to know home addresses, birthdays, hobbies. Users had to fill in more than 20 fields to get access.

Internet conventional wisdom was shocked even more when users did not turn away. Huge numbers of users filled out the fields, and often volunteered such non-required information as their phone number and family income. Some 1.7 million people are now registered with Belo Interactive sites. "Jim's vision was that by knowing our customers more intimately than our competitors, we will have a relationship that will give us a long-term competitive advantage," Fisk says.



Duty calls, again

Belo Interactive had barely cleared that hurdle when Robert Decherd called Moroney into his office again. Moroney says he could tell something really big was up: "Robert closes the door. Robert never closes the door. And he brings out a flip chart. And I'm thinking, oh my God ? this is going to be worse than corporate controller."

The job Decherd had in mind was publisher. "I kept coming back to Jim as the most logical candidate," he says. "He knows our values and operating principles as well as anyone in Belo, he practices them, and he knows our businesses."

Moroney claims the offer came out of the blue, but it was no surprise to the newsroom's top executive. Editor Bob Mong had developed a friendship with Moroney when he, too, was working a "corporate job outside my comfort zone." Says Mong: "When you look at his career progression, it wasn't a shock. There probably isn't one person, aside from Robert, who knows Belo better than Jim."

Moroney would be filling the big shoes of retiring Burl Osborne, who as editor and then publisher saw the paper through its most parlous time. "I think the reason we're here and not all working for the Times- Herald probably has more to do with Burl Osborne than any other single person," says Managing Editor Stuart Wilk.

The new publisher, Decherd says, would have to keep the Morning News' quality high even as the paper was taking a $100 million revenue hit. But Decherd wanted change: "We'd been doing things the same way for a long time."

Moroney brought changes. Even as the economy remained flat, he gathered executives for a brainstorming session hundreds of miles away in Austin to settle on goals, strategies and tactics. Back in the office, Moroney walked around with $100 bills. Any employee who could recite the five goals would get a C-note on the spot. "That strategic approach that involves setting goals and measurements for everything we do has just made a tremendous difference in the culture of the company," Mong says.

One of those goals was creating new products. He recruited Laura Gordon, a consumer products marketer with Unilever, to the new position of managing director of new product development. Her charge was to find print products for underserved markets. Their research produced the Quick prototypes that allowed the rapid launch. Ironically, the youth-oriented tab tested in second place of five or six niche products. The winner, a monthly product that no one at the Morning News will describe further, will come out sooner or later ? and so will the rest, Gordon says.

When Quick was about to be launched, Moroney made a Decherd-style surprise appointment of his own: He named Gordon as publisher of the youth tab. "At some point, I guess I assumed he'd tell me what the job description of a publisher is," Gordon laughs. Moroney, it seems, prefers to let Quick, published in a building down the street from the Morning News, write most of its own rules.

The paper energizes even its parent, says Morning News Managing Editor Wilk: "It's not just that it exists, it's the look and the feel of the product, too. It's edgy. It's got attitude. It's not your grandfather's Dallas Morning News."



Five is enough

Moroney stays busy off the job, too. He and his wife Barbara have five children. He estimates that he's coached 30 seasons of soccer and T-ball so far, and the twins are still only in third grade.

His retired mentor at Belo, Ward Huey, says Moroney succeeds simply because people like working for him. "Jim Moroney is not from CEO Central Casting," he says. "He knows who he is and he doesn't try to be somebody he's not, so people are very comfortable with him."

Moroney wants people comfortable with him, but not with the status quo. "He uses the term 'revolution' a lot," Executive Editor Gil Bailon says. "He doesn't want to just repaint the walls ? he wants to knock them down."