May/June 2000 | Contents

A PUBLISHER'S LIFE: REID ASHE OF THE TAMPA TRIBUNE

BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM

When Reid Ashe was growing up outside Charlotte, North Carolina, he didn't have a paper route or start his own neighborhood newspaper. Instead, he built and dismantled radios, learned telegraph code, and tinkered with electronics.

Forty years later, the tinkering continues, only now the stakes are much higher. As publisher of the Tampa Tribune, Ashe, 51, has just overseen the building of a new, $40 million headquarters designed around a multimedia vision of the future. What he calls his "laboratory" may be the future of newspapers, or it may "be obsolete in three years," as he says.

Ashe seems unlikely in the role of journalistic mad scientist, but he doesn't immediately make you think c.e.o. either. Tall, reed-thin, with a shock of dark hair going gray at the temples, he is the embodiment of dignified reserve. Still, an oft-told story on Ashe is how once, during an editorial board meeting when he was publisher of The Wichita Eagle, he cursed, balled up a press release and threw it at the feet of Wichita's mayor, who was complaining about the paper's coverage.

Ashe is described variously as Socratic, introverted, exceptionally sharp, and a true southern gentleman. But years later, in another town, people still revisit that one incident in his career when, as he puts it, "I lost it." Perhaps because it's the exception that proves the rule. "I'm scared of losing control," Ashe says, "so I try not to do that. Maybe that's just who I am. I can't control other people, so I control myself. The leaders I've admired do that."

If Ashe fears losing control, he also seems to thrive on testing it. Ashe got his pilot's license in college and now describes his six-seat Piper Aztec as "the family station wagon." He often flies it to his scuba diving trips, like the one last month on Little Cayman Island in the Caribbean. More important, he has made a career of gamely pushing into the journalistic wilderness, challenging traditional approaches despite skepticism and mixed results. "In the newsroom it was always the scientific method with Reid," says Steven A. Smith, who was managing editor under Ashe in Wichita. "He would let us take any idea and run with it, and if it proved itself, fine, if not it was on to something else."

Ashe took an unconventional path to newspapering. The only child of older parents, he grew up comfortably middle class in Belmont, North Carolina. His father had a successful business selling textile machinery, his mother managed the home and helped with the family business. The self-control came naturally. "My parents were a little reserved, but they weren't cold," he says. "Self-reliance was important to them."

When it came time for college, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied electrical engineering. It was the late '60s, and things were somewhat livelier on campus than they had been in Belmont. Friends persuaded him to come work for one of the student newspapers. "I realized that engineering was interesting," Ashe recalls, "but journalism was consuming."

A few months after graduating in 1970, he landed a reporting job at the Washington, North Carolina, Daily News. Four months later, Ashe went to The Jackson Sun, then a 32,000-circulation daily in western Tennessee. By the time he was twenty-five, Ashe was executive editor of the Sun. At twenty-nine, he was publisher. "I remember people saying I was too young to be publisher," he says. "They don't say that anymore."

His rapid rise was impressive. But his next move was even more pivotal. In 1984, when Ashe was all of thirty-five, James Batten, the chairman of Knight Ridder, tapped him to run Viewtron, the company's $50 million stab at revolutionizing news delivery. The two had met when Ashe, still at MIT, interviewed for a job at The Charlotte Observer. "I was pretty well-suited for it," Ashe says now of the Viewtron job. "I could serve as a bridge between the technology folks and the newspaper folks."

After a run of success, Viewtron gave Ashe a taste of defeat. Viewtron was a precursor to Internet services like America Online that today we take for granted. In addition to on-demand news, Viewtron had chat rooms, e-mail, even a reverse auction called BidQuick. But the project labored under exorbitant costs (it preceded the personal computer revolution, and required custom-made software, and subscribers had to be outfitted with interface boxes for their televisions) and what Ashe calls a misperception about what people really wanted from such a service. Two years later, Knight Ridder abandoned Viewtron. With the support of Batten, his new mentor, Ashe moved on to be publisher in Wichita where he would stay for the next ten years. But his philosophy about newspapers and where they were headed remained grounded in what he gleaned from his Viewtron experience.

For one thing, Ashe noticed that the handful of Viewtron subscribers who stuck around long enough eventually gravitated to the communal features of the service: chat rooms, e-mail, interactive games. It was this insight that opened Ashe to public journalism, then a new idea emerging in newspaper circles. "It taught me that the value of news is not in the news itself," he says, "but in the ability to bind us together as a community and serve our common interests and concerns."

Wichita was fertile ground for these new ideas. With Batten paving the way at corporate, and Davis "Buzz" Merritt, Jr., the Eagle's editor, trying to make it happen in the newsroom, the Eagle became a public journalism pioneer in the early 1990s. "Reid immediately understood the significance and potential of the whole public journalism thing," says Merritt. Together they explored "community connectedness," a controversial approach that still raises hackles among journalists.

But election projects, community forums, and other public journalism experiments were just part of Ashe's tinkering in Wichita. He created an entrepreneurial wing that focused primarily on book and periodical publishing. From 1991 until Knight Ridder scuttled it in 1996, the Eagle's development department, as it was called, churned out some fifty books, mostly sports handbooks on big-name college programs, but also things like Wichita Alive and Well, a health and fitness magazine. It also produced compact discs of traditional music from the region.

Ashe also dismantled the copy desk and created "content teams," which then handled their own copy editing. The results were mixed. Ashe concedes that "the quality control over the finer points of copy editing slipped," and the approach was later abandoned. Still, he talks about it like a scientist wistfully recounting an experiment that didn't quite turn out. "It was a fascinating exercise," he says. "We solved some problems, but we created others."

Wichita's problems, however, were bigger than Ashe's tinkering. Circulation dropped and profit pressures tightened in a state that was losing population. In 1994, the Eagle endured the first layoffs in the paper's history. There were acrimonious union negotiations. In an effort to cut costs, Ashe dropped home delivery to 10,000 subscribers in the farthest reaches of the circulation area -- a controversial move for a paper that considered itself the newspaper of Kansas. It all took its toll on Ashe. "I know the situation was wearing him down," Smith says. "I don't know any publisher who could survive under those conditions. After a while you just sort of lose heart."

If he lost heart, he remained a motivational leader. Sheri Dill, a vice president for marketing at the Eagle, says she once researched whether offering a subscription premium -- like a coffee mug or an umbrella -- would boost sales. Her research concluded that it made no difference, yet when the next circulation push began it included a premium. Dill went to Ashe to find out why. "He said, 'You know, Sheri, sometimes the salespeople just need something to sell, a gimmick, a fresh pitch.' I came to see Reid do this kind of thing a lot," she says. "He would subject the numbers to an intellectual and emotional sniff test, and then make decisions that weren't always backed up by the numbers."

In 1994, Batten was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died the next year. Ashe -- like many others in Knight Ridder -- suddenly found himself without the man who had helped guide his career for nearly a decade. "Without Jim Batten, I felt like I had no future in the company," he says. In 1996, Ashe went to Tampa to be publisher of the Tribune.

The Tribune's parent company, Richmond-based Media General, owns twenty-one -- mostly small -- daily newspapers in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, and fourteen television stations. With a circulation of about 235,000, the Tribune is the company's largest paper. Last year, Media General had one of the highest profit margins (33.4 percent) of any publicly owned newspaper company, according to John Morton, a media analyst. But it also has a reputation for giving local publishers considerable autonomy. The company hasn't exactly embraced the concept of public journalism that is at the core of Ashe's philosophy. "In fact," says Ashe, "the chairman, Stewart Bryan, is skeptical of what has been called public journalism. But he believes in community service and strong, vigorous journalism, which is at the heart of good journalism no matter what you call it."

Now, from his spacious office in downtown Tampa, Ashe looks out at his latest experiment: The News Center, Media General's $40 million entry into convergence media. Ashe is as excited about it as a kid with a new chemistry set. "I have this great laboratory next door with opportunities you won't find in most places," he says. "But everything we see in new media today is going to be obsolete in three years. So the first thing you have to do is accept the fact that the future is unpredictable and consider the human needs of the people you are serving. Why do people read newspapers? Why do they watch TV news? Why do they go to one place on the Internet and not another? We are social animals. What we're looking for are linkages to one another."

Gil Thelen, his editor and partner in innovation, says Ashe is particularly suited to oversee this convergence laboratory: "He tolerates smart risk-taking. That's essential because this is a work in progress." As evidence, Thelen points to their decision to create the paper's next zoned edition online rather than in print. "It means we will scoop ourselves online with stories that will then run a few days later in the paper," he says.

Thelen, who like Ashe was greatly influenced by Batten during his nearly twenty years as an editor at Knight Ridder papers, sees in his current boss the same kind of "servant-leader" qualities that Batten exemplified. "If you come to Reid with an idea that is logical, practical, and attainable, he will do everything in his power to help you get it done," he says. As Thelen has gone about moving the Tribune newsroom away from a traditional beat structure to one that is more issue-oriented, he says, Ashe has worked his magic at corporate to get the kind of reporting and editing talent he needs. "I hadn't anticipated how really, really good he is at managing corporate," says Thelen. "In fact, what I knew about him at Knight Ridder was that he stood his ground with corporate and sometimes got into trouble. Here, he stands his ground but doesn't get into trouble."

Still, Thelen sometimes wants to see a bit more of the old Wichita temper from Ashe. "The flip side of his diplomacy and courtliness is that he doesn't always drop the hammer real hard. There are times I want him to bang his shoe on the table."

It's not as if the Tampa years have been without turmoil. As in Wichita, Ashe has had to cut back circulation in outlying areas, a process that began before he arrived. Their rival across the bay, the St. Petersburg Times, continues to try to muscle in on the Tribune's turf. Then there was the situation with Tom McEwen, long-time Tribune columnist whose travel agency did business with the Tampa teams he wrote about. When the situation came to light, Ashe and Thelen took heat from their peers for not cutting McEwen loose, especially after McEwen failed to immediately end the business dealings. (Ashe now says the agency no longer does business with the teams). When the subject comes up, Ashe displays those diplomatic skills Thelen mentioned. "Tom's career was in another era when there was another set of rules. He is a much-beloved figure in town, he writes a very popular column." The plan now is to have a farewell bash for McEwen at next year's Super Bowl, which is in Tampa, and that will mark the end of his work for the Tribune.

Ashe starts most days with a run, four or five miles on the streets near the home in residential Tampa he shares with wife, Lisa -- who is also a journalist -- and their two sons, ages eleven and fourteen. He gets to work around eight and leaves around seven. In between, he says, he spends his time talking to people. Mondays start with a department head meeting around the small table in Ashe's office. At nine there is a weekly conference call with his boss, Graham Woodlief, Jr., president of Media General's publishing operations, and the other publishers who report to Woodlief. "We share problems and ideas, it's a team-building process," Ashe says of the call. Monday afternoons there is a similar conference call with all Media General's Florida publishers. He drops in irregularly on news and editorial board meetings, occasionally schmoozes with advertisers but leaves the deals to the sales folks. As a rule, he doesn't read stories before they go into the paper.

Even after thirty years of journalism, the inner engineer is strong in Ashe. He subscribes to Scientific American and is still a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He organizes his life on a Palm Pilot, and confesses, when pressed, to having a flight simulator on his home computer. His science background still makes him something of a curiosity in the business. "Journalists are generally right-brain people, and Reid is a left-brain guy," says Janet Weaver, who was a managing editor under Ashe in Wichita and now is executive editor at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. "In meetings, people would be debating something passionately and Reid would be kicked back in his chair with this distant look on his face, and we all would be wondering if he was even paying attention. Then he spoke and you realized that not only had he been listening, but he had taken what everyone was saying and synthesized it into something no one had even considered."

Ashe smiles when told of Weaver's memory of him. "I think a great deal of Janet," is his only response. He seems uncomfortable discussing his intellect and unconventional ways. Perhaps, like a real scientist, he would prefer to be left alone with his experiments. Or maybe just steal away in his plane, or lose himself in the solitude of a dive among the coral. He says he suffers the social aspects of being publisher as "part of the job," and does only as much as he has to. It's the control thing at work again. "One of the things I've learned is that when you are in a leadership position, people watch you very closely," he says. "So maybe I've learned to watch what I say."

Brent Cunningham is an assistant editor at cjr.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe