Shake-up p.

By: M. L. Stein

Top executives resign from San Francisco Newspaper Agency;
retired Kansas City Star board chairman named new president/CEO
by ROBERT McCORMICK, PRESIDENT and CEO of the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, and three other top agency managers have resigned in a major shake-up of the organization.
James H. Hale, retired board chairman and publisher of the Kansas City Star and former publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was named the new president and CEO of the agency, succeeding McCormick.
The others, who quit in a block June 18, were Thomas Clancy, executive vice president of sales; Lawrence Ingram, senior vice president of operations, and John Raytis, vice president of circulation.
The agency is the business and production arm of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner under their joint operating agreement.
An inside source, who requested anonymity, told E&P that both newspapers had been dissatisfied with the agency's performance.
"Their leaving did not come as a surprise to them," the source said.
The Examiner reported in its business section that "further cuts are expected in the agency as the two newspapers work together to improve their bottom line in the face of California's long recession and aggressive competition from other Bay area media."
The morning Chronicle, which considers itself a regional paper, competes with two major dailies, the San Jose Mercury News and Oakland Tribune, as well as a host of suburban dailies and weeklies.
The agency's management changes were described by Examiner editor and publisher Will Hearst as "part of a restructuring of our business. They are the result of a decision jointly made by the Examiner and Chronicle Publishing."
The Examiner said a source reported that the Examiner and Chronicle circulation operations will be combined.
Chronicle circulation director Steven Falk will take over the duties of former agency vice president Raytis and also those of Examiner circulation director Stephen Hearst, a cousin of Will Hearst, it was reported.
Alice Hodge, the San Francisco Newspaper Agency's vice president for marketing, said in an E&P interview that Hale had been recruited by John B. Sias, the new chief executive of Chronicle Publishing and a former executive vice president of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. Both the Star and Star-Telegram are Capital Cities papers.
Hale, 65, also got a favorable send-off from Robert J. Danzig, vice president and general manager of the newspaper division of the Hearst Corp., the Examiner's parent company.
Danzig was quoted in the Examiner as saying of Hale: "This is a fellow who . . . wherever he's been, the people have remembered what he had to say and the integrity with which he said it."
The newspaper agency has about 2,100 employees, more than triple the combined number of the Chronicle and Examiner.
According to a newsletter published by the Chronicle unit of the Newspaper Guild, Sias told Chronicle staff members that he was examining agency cutbacks first "because that's where the money is."