A man of many interests, Andy Barnes secured private, local ownership of the Times. Now he retires as its chairman.
By DAVID BALLINGRUD
Published May 5, 2004
Times photo (2002)
Andy Barnes, who will retire on his 65th birthday, has been at the St. Petersburg Times for more than 30 years, and chairman and CEO for more than 15 years. "I know many people are afraid of retirement," he said. "That's not the case with me. I'm ready."
Times photo (2001)
Eugene Patterson, editor emeritus of the St. Petersburg Times, Paul C. Tash, editor and president, and Andrew Barnes, chairman and CEO, stand in the lobby of the Poynter Institute with a portrait of Nelson Poynter.
Times photo (1990)
Barnes updates the staff in the newsroom during the ownership struggle with Texas financier Robert M. Bass. "Emotionally it was immensely difficult. I felt it was crucial that we not fail," Barnes said of the challenge. "At the same time I was truly afraid that we might not bring this off."
Times photo (1974)
Andy Barnes, seated, and Rob Hooker look over the paper after President Richard Nixon resigned. Barnes was metropolitan editor at the time.
Nelson Poynter had a vision, and the wisdom and determination to make it real.
Eugene Patterson was an inspirational leader who raised the company's standards and its national profile.
But it was Andy Barnes - a private man in the most public of businesses - who finally secured the independence of the St. Petersburg Times.
"He did something Nelson Poynter was unable to do, and something I was unable to do," said Patterson. In winning a prolonged takeover fight against Texas financier Robert M. Bass in 1990, Barnes "brought complete ownership of the Times back home where it belonged."
Now Barnes, chairman and chief executive of the Times for the past 15 years, is stepping down. On May 15, his 65th birthday, he will turn his responsibilities over to Paul C. Tash, 49, the newspaper's editor and president.
Tonight at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort in St. Petersburg, several hundred friends and community leaders will gather to honor Barnes and send him off into retirement.
"The word retirement conjures up images of people in a Winnebago, and I won't be doing that," he said. "But I am ready to lessen the weight on my shoulders."
At least for a time, Barnes will remain as chairman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the nonprofit journalism school that owns the Times. He will be chairman of the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes. He also will research the personal and professional papers of Nelson Poynter, whose belief in independent journalism still guides the Times.
"What will come of it, I'm not sure," he said. "Perhaps some articles; perhaps a book."
"I hope to have more time to know my grandchildren," he wrote in a farewell note to the Times staff, "to build furniture, and generally to lead a more private life."
The Barnes-Tash transition maintains an ownership structure that was ground-breaking in American journalism.
Before his death in 1978, Poynter willed his majority control of the newspaper to a nonprofit school for journalists (now called the Poynter Institute) and designated Patterson to vote the stock as his successor. When Patterson retired in 1988, control passed to his chosen successor, Barnes, just as Barnes now gives way to Tash.
The ownership structure guarantees that the company remains a private, independent newspaper beholden to neither out-of-town corporate owners nor stockholders primarily concerned about profits. It has helped make the Times a paper that "many journalists consider the nation's finest local newspaper," the American Journalism Review said in 1998.
During Barnes' 15 years as chairman:
The newspaper won three Pulitzer Prizes (and two more during his earlier years as managing editor and editor and president).
Steady growth over five west-central Florida counties made the Times Florida's largest daily paper. In 1987, the year before Barnes became chairman, the average circulation was 307,994 daily and 394,962 on Sunday. Last year it had grown to 334,337 daily and 420,249 on Sunday.
A significant portion of that growth came in Tampa and its fast-growing suburbs. The Times expanded into Tampa in 1987 and, under Barnes, has steadily ramped up its coverage there in a battle with the Tampa Tribune. The newspaper's circulation in Hillsborough County, which in 1986 was 3,396 daily and 4,620 on Sunday, is now more than 30,000 daily and nearly 40,000 on Sunday.
The business side of the newspaper became more "competent, vigorous and disciplined," said Tash. The company and its affiliates generated $204-million in revenue in 1988 and will hit about $300-million this year.
(In addition to the Times, the company owns Congressional Quarterly, which covers Congress and the federal government; Governing and Florida Trend magazines; and a group of weekly community newspapers.)
By far, however, Barnes' most important accomplishment came when the untested newspaper executive stood his ground against a determined effort by outsiders to take control of the company. Had that happened, Poynter's vision of an independent newspaper, beholden only to the public interest, would have become a curious footnote in the paper's history.
An ominous phone call
It was less than two weeks before Patterson's retirement in 1988 when the phone rang in Barnes' office.
On the line was Bass, who informed Barnes that he and other investors had bought 40 percent of the voting stock in Times Publishing Co.
The news was a jolt. That stock long had been held by Eleanor Poynter Jamison, Poynter's sister. Although she often squabbled with her brother, Mrs. Jamison had been content to hold onto the stock.
Her two daughters had other ideas. When they got control of the stock upon their mother's death in 1987, they sold it to a partnership that included Bass, a billionaire investor and corporate raider.
"It was no accident Bass called me," Barnes said. "Gene was retiring and they thought we might be vulnerable."
In public and with the staff, Barnes tried to look calm. In private, he was worried sick.
"I was totally unprepared for the Bass challenge," he said. "Emotionally it was immensely difficult. I felt it was crucial that we not fail, and in order to keep the organization functioning I had to display confidence and underplay peril, at the same time I was truly afraid that we might not bring this off."
A well-heeled corporate raider swooping into St. Petersburg to take on the local newspaper might seem like an uneven fight. Tom Goldstein, a friend who taught at the University of Florida and is now a journalism professor at Arizona State University, said Barnes faced "a formidable array of talent."
But Barnes had resources, too.
One was Warren E. Buffett, one of the world's richest men. Barnes consulted Buffett at the urging of Katharine Graham, then publisher of the Washington Post, who herself often relied on the legendary chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Co.
Barnes visited the "Oracle of Omaha" in Nebraska, and got an earful about the tactics and determination of men such as Bass. Closer to home he consulted with a Belleair Bluffs financier named Owen Roberts, a financial backer of a Barnes political opposite - Newt Gingrich, then a Republican congressman from Georgia.
"And it wasn't just Bass," said Goldstein. Barnes also had to fend off an inquiry by Yale University, which felt it might have a claim to ownership of the Times based on a tax contingency provision in Poynter's will. Eventually, after sharp public criticism from the Times, the university decided not to pursue a challenge.
"It was a heavyweight lineup he faced," said Goldstein. "He dealt with it the way a reporter would. He remained calm and set out to learn. But it was difficult. The way the Times operates, there is only one man at the top, and Andy was that man."
Eventually, Barnes refused the Bass group's $270-million offer to buy a controlling interest in Times Publishing. "It comes down to a question of whether money is everything, or can American business also serve higher interests," he said at the time.
In the summer of 1990, Bass and his partners agreed to sell their shares to the Times for $56-million, a transaction that brought all of the stock under the newspaper's control. It had been two years since that phone call from Bass - two years that took a toll.
"His hair turned white," said Molly Barnes, his wife. "He didn't sleep well during that time, and it took a year to recover."
The ordeal - and the victory - "tested him and it established him," said Tash, "and it brought him out of Gene Patterson's shadow."
Listening skills
Andrew Earl Barnes was born in Torrington, Conn., on May 15, 1939, and raised in New York City. His mother, Elizabeth Brown Barnes, taught psychology at Sarah Lawrence. His father, Joseph Barnes, was a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and editor of the New York Star.
Andy Barnes' career in journalism began in 1961 at the Providence Journal, after his graduation from Harvard University. In 1965 he went to the Washington Post, where he worked with Gene Patterson, a Pulitzer Prize winner who joined the Post as managing editor in 1968.
In 1972, Poynter brought Patterson to St. Petersburg to be editor and president of the Times and his successor as chairman. The next year, Patterson recruited Barnes to follow him south and become metro editor.
In the competitive clamor of the Post newsroom, where egos often collided, Barnes stood out for the right reasons, Patterson said. "He was businesslike and well-spoken. He gave you a straight evaluation (of a story). You did not have to discount what he said. You could see he was going to be a talent."
Barnes became Times editor and president in 1984, then chairman and chief executive in 1988. His leadership style was nothing like that of the man who preceded him.
Patterson had been a tank platoon leader under Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in World War II, and newsroom wags dubbed him "the tank commander." A short, square man whose big personality quickly filled a room, Patterson commanded immediate attention. Leadership came naturally.
Barnes was an intellectual in every sense of the word - well read, erudite, thoughtful, sometimes given to rhetorical flourishes that baffled colleagues.
But despite the professorial style, he was approachable, even "Uncle Andy" to some.
"You can get in close to Andy," said Tash.
But Uncle Andy had a temper, too, and those on the receiving end were unlikely to forget it. His dressing down of an unprepared editor was rare but rough.
Barnes is a leader with a quick mind and lots of questions, Tash said. A back-and-forth with Barnes on a news story, he said, "could feel like being on the receiving end of a tutorial, and you could sense that the ice beneath your feet is not very thick."
Barnes knew that wise managers listen.
"I learned how to seek counsel from smart people who know about things I don't know about," he said. "I was prepared to ask - and to hear the answer."
For most, Barnes was affable and approachable.
The hardest thing about his job, he once said, "is having to find your friends insufficient in their performance."
"He was willing to hear bad news from people far below him in rank," said Tallahassee bureau chief Lucy Morgan. "I think he is more open to criticism than any CEO or government leader I've ever dealt with."
In his role as chairman, Barnes sat at the head of the board of editorial writers and could have overruled board decisions.
"He never placed a heavy hand on the board," said Philip Gailey, named editor of editorials in 1991. "Never. He made his feelings known, but he never overruled a board decision. He had respect for the process."
Under the guidance of Barnes and Gailey, the Times maintained its traditionally liberal editorial policy. But many feel it has been steered more to the political center, both in its editorials and the selection of op-ed page columnists.
Martin Dyckman, editorial columnist and Times staffer for 45 years, agrees, to a point. "If there has been change, it's only at the margins," he said. "Perhaps we're a little less predictable, but there has been no sea change."
Challenges from within
During Barnes' years of leadership, African-Americans and women challenged the Times' commitment to diversity and equal pay.
Barnes himself remembers that when he came to the Times in 1973 department head meetings had a sameness to them.
"It's easy to forget how white, how male we were," he said.
In 1991, complaints by women in the newsroom prompted Barnes to institute a series of workplace improvements, including an analysis of pay scales and adjustment of some salaries.
Three years later, African-Americans on the staff issued a stinging rebuke. The Times, a committee of African-American staffers said in 1994, had lost its way. It was no longer a beacon of hope for minorities trying to catch up in a society that had turned away.
This could be addressed in part, they said, by putting Peggy Peterman on the Times board of directors.
Peterman had just graduated from law school when she came to work for the Times in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement. She spent three decades as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer.
The Times' African-American Committee called her a "mentor, inspiration and tower of strength for generations of black journalists at the Times."
But Barnes said no and stood his ground, saying board members should hold key supervisory positions within the company.
"There is no question Peggy Peterman is a worthy, respected senior staff member," he said in a letter to the committee. But "to ask anyone (of whatever gender or color) who lacks substantial organizational responsibility and experience to function in a body of people who have it is to invite frustration and failure." He did pledge to "push for diversity of race and gender and age and circumstance in all the ways I know how."
The pressure did not let up, and in September 2002, Barnes promised to appoint a minority board member before he retired this year. He kept his promise in December of that year, appointing Karen Brown Dunlap, a veteran African-American journalist and educator, to the board.
"I wanted someone chosen on the basis of talent, who happened to be black, not because he or she was black," Barnes said recently. "And I was willing to put up with all the trouble to do it."
Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute, "is not only an important piece of symbolism," Barnes said recently. "She is a very able woman; she'll do the job."
The company remains committed to diversity, he said, recalling that at a recent meeting of about 20 new mid-level managers a half dozen were African-American and more than half were female.
"Never been bored'
When Andy and Molly Barnes moved to St. Petersburg in 1973, two children came with them. A third was born here. Washington had been "a hard place to raise children," he said. "It was expensive on the kind of salary I was making."
St. Petersburg was a little dreary at the time, he acknowledged, but it soon felt like home.
"I came down here and work was suddenly wonderfully interesting. The logistics of life were easy. I rode my bike to work and I liked the people I worked with. . . . I have come to quite like this community."
"I know many people are afraid of retirement," Barnes said. "That's not the case with me. I'm ready."
Peter Betzer, dean of the College of Marine Science at USF, once called Barnes "an intellectual omnivore" and "a great white shark of an intellect."
Molly Barnes makes a similar, if less colorful, claim. "He's a man of many interests. He's never been bored a minute in his life."
It seems those who knew him best will miss him most.
Tash said of his mentor: "It seems a bit absurd to say this, because we've seen this transition coming for some years, but it does seem to have arrived fairly suddenly. For me, it's hard to think of the St. Petersburg Times without Andy Barnes.
"I will miss him terribly."
- Former Times staff writer David Barstow contributed to this report.
