Why Sam Zell Avoids the 'Big Lies' of New Owners

By: Mark Fitzgerald (Commentary) When it comes to philosophers, the British like classically trained academicians, the French like contrarians with a radical political streak, and Americans, well, we like rich people.

He can be a heartless boss like Andrew Carnegie or a hateful anti-Semite like Henry Ford, or just a boring bridge player like Warren Buffet, but when a guy who has a ton of money starts to pontificate -- we Americans crane to hear every syllable. We weigh every word.

Sure, most of Rich Guy's pronouncements turn out, on examination, to be empty cliches, but this is a nation that has made best-sellers out of books spun around the most hollow of notions. Think "Who Moved My Cheese?" or anything by Napoleon Hill.

So it wasn't just the natural interest in the most unusual newspaper deal yet in a two-year period of jaw-dropping newspaper deals that drew a media crowd to Sam Zell's press conference at Tribune Tower Thursday afternoon.

There was also that billionaire thing.

Fairly or not, it freighted every word Zell spoke, even when he was cheerfully -- and occasionally profanely -- asserting that he really didn't know anything about the newspaper business, except that it was a business. And he knows business, so it stands to reason he knows the newspaper business.

At least I think that's a fair summation of what he said over the course of a half-hour of rapid-fire questioning.

Zell resists easy generalizations, even as he offered quite a few himself when pressed about what's next now that he engineered the $8.2 billion buyout and privatization of Tribune Co. with a personal investment of $315 million. There was, for instance, his summation of the newspaper business as coming down to the "Three R's:" relevance, revenue, and respect. And not necessarily in that order, he quickly added.

We journalists nodded. And wrote that down.

But that was better than the single time he offered a very specific suggestion for newspapers. They should put a url at the end of each article, you see, to direct readers to "learn more" at its Web site.

Uh, Sam, 1999 called, and wants its Big Idea back. (Geez, where the heck did I put my CueCat?)

If newspapers have learned anything from their bruising experience with the World Wide Web, it's that time-pressed readers don't want to be told to read "more" somewhere else -- and that interactive isn't about putting print online. (Though to be fair, Zell made exactly that point, too, answering another question.)

And the proud Tribsters standing behind the line of TV cameras couldn't help but be a little chilled as Zell heaped praise on the newspaper expertise of his newly appointed board director, Brian Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun. Nor when he said he got a lot of good ideas from Brian Tierney at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Still, Zell's first public discussion after taking control Tribune -- through, of course, an employee stock ownership plan, (and Zell should be mighty grateful that no journalist Thursday brought up the inconvenient truth that this ESOP is structured employees will have almost no "ownership" voice for a long, long time) -- was sort of refreshing.

There was no blather about "synergy" or "national footprint" or "scale." Best of all, Zell avoided the biggest of all the Big Lies of new owners: We like what the (insert name newspaper or chain here), and we have no plans to change it.

Zell promised plenty of change, even if he offered few specifics.

And it's probably unfair, too, to hold the occasional contradictions against him. That's probably in his nature. After all, this is a man whose speaking manages at the same time to be high-pitched and yet mightily suggestive of a Tom Waits growl. Walt Whitman, who embraced his contradictions, would probably have tooled around in motorcycle if he could have.

And Whitman surely would have worn the same kind of jeans and slouch jacket outfit that Zell wore to usher in a new era.

That era will be, in an unfortunate choice of words, a "brave new world," Zell declared. But I thought the real estate mogul was absolutely spot on when he said one thing that didn't get picked up much in the morning papers: "I've always said that what this company needs is an owner."

Tribune, meet the new boss -- decidedly not the same as the old boss.