will the eagle still fly?

Late this summer, just as the New England hillsides were showing signs of their fall palette, The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts ended 103 years of family ownership. It's an oft-told tale: big corporate owner, in this case William Dean Singleton of MediaNews Group, buys small, family-run operation and takes ax to jobs and salaries. But those expecting a story about the tragic loss of family ownership at a proud paper can forget it. The old Eagle died after a long, and bitter, illness brought on by amazingly bad investments. Few mourned the departure of the founding family.

 For years, the Eagle enjoyed a great reputation. The 30,000-circulation broadsheet launched the careers of many journalists who remember the paper, and its longtime editor and publisher, Lawrence K. "Pete" Miller, with fond admiration. Benevolent paternalism reigned for decades, with stable profits supporting a large, well-paid staff. Until the sale, top scale for reporters was about $42,000. Eagle journalists took pride in a tradition of integrity and thought of themselves as special, with a Pulitzer and other prizes to suggest that they were.

But a series of disastrous business decisions by the Miller family's third-generation owners, headed by Michael G. Miller as president of Eagle Publishing Co., drove the company near bankruptcy by last December, when Miller announced that it was for sale.

Dozens of publishing companies looked at Eagle Publishing, whose other properties included The Middletown Press in Connecticut and the Brattleboro Reformer and Bennington Banner in Vermont. But the company's debt of more than $30 million apparently scared away all suitors but one -- Singleton, widely seen as a slash-and-burn publisher whose first (or only) priority is profit, the man who just this year pocketed a bundle by shutting down The Houston Post. (cjr, September/October.)

It was the end of an era at the Eagle, an end that many thought was premature. The Eagle has a loyal readership, is still profitable, and has no serious competition. The problem, says Donald MacGillis, who was executive editor until last February and was let go after the sale, "is just a family making a number of catastrophically wrong decisions."

Two decisions proved fatal. In need of bigger quarters, Eagle Publishing bought a cavernous brick factory in Pittsfield called the Clock Tower and spent $23.5 million restoring it, describing it as an investment in the city's future. But by the time it was completed in 1990, Pitts-field's economy was sleeping with the fishes. Except for the Eagle, the stunning building remains mostly empty.

 And then there was the purchase of the Middletown paper in 1991, the year Pete Miller died. It was losing money, and the Millers decided to convert it to a morning paper. But that locked it in a head-to-head battle with the much larger Hartford Courant. The Press drained millions more from the company.

 Mark Miller, Michael's brother and the Eagle's longtime editor, describes the last few years of his family's stewardship of Eagle Publishing as "meltdown." Michael Miller refused to be interviewed for this article. But no one questions Mark's assessment.

The new reality emerged on August 8, the day after the announcement that Singleton would buy the paper. Eagle employees, regardless of rank or seniority, were directed to start interviewing for jobs with the new company. They were told that such details as salary and benefits -- even what jobs they were applying for -- would be supplied to them when the sale was completed at the end of the month.

 On August 31, the staff got a stark lesson in the ethos of the bottom line. Once again, one by one, the paper's thirty-seven photographers, repor-ters, and editors were called into the office of David Scribner to learn their fate. Scribner, an old friend of Michael Miller's who had arrived from The Middletown Press in February, was the Eagle's new editor, although many in the newsroom still regarded him as an interloper.

The procedure was as efficient as it was gut-wrenching. First, people were told whether they had a job or not. If they did, Scribner handed them a piece of paper that described the basic terms and their new salaries, sometimes as an hourly rate. People were expected to read the paper and put their initials next to the words "accept" or "reject" on the spot. There were virtually no negotiations. This was day one of the Singleton era.

In the end, six reporters and editors, including MacGillis and Gae Elfenbein, a co-president of the newspaper's union, the Eagle News Association, lost their jobs. Five others refused job offers. Those who remained were asked to accept pay cuts, most ranging from 20 percent to 37 percent. "It's a bloodbath," said Elfenbein.

 The next day, readers of the Eagle found no information about the reductions in their morning paper, even though local radio stations and The Associated Press were reporting the news. Many people took this as a sign of life under Singleton.

But in another twist to the tale, Scribner told cjr he had been honoring a request from the Miller family, not Singleton, although he never shared that fact with his staff. On the day after the sale was completed, readers and the staff were treated to a thorough front-page story by news editor Clarence Fanto based on documents he had obtained that week.

Singleton, meanwhile, claims he'll spend enough at the Eagle to keep quality up, and several reporters and editors, while skeptical, said they're willing to be convinced. Scribner, for his part, acknowledges that he faces a challenge in getting the staff to keep producing good work, but he insists he can do it, calling himself "a maverick" whose job is "liberating the Eagle from its hidebound arrogance."

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