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Responsibility. The Gannett papers, nonetheless, share distinct family traits that go beyond sound management or geographical proximity. (Except for Illinois' Danville Commercial-News, New Jersey's Plainfield Courier-News and the Hartford Times, all are published in New York cities and small towns.) Conservative in news judgment as in politics, they have little use for exposes, play down stories of sex and crime. "A newspaper, to suit me," said Gannett, "must be one that I would be willing to have my mother, my own sister or daughter read." Many readers, particularly in the 15 cities where Gannett has a monopoly, complain that the modern mothers would not object to livelier coverage or sharper writing.
On the other hand, most of the papers are enthusiastic home-town boosters, campaign busily for local improvements, sponsor dozens of community enterprises. In keeping with this sense of community responsibility—and to perpetuate his newspapers—Publisher Gannett in 1935 gave two-thirds of his Gannett Co. common stock to a philanthropic foundation administered by his executives.
The Great Hyphenator. For his career of building profitable provincial dailies, farm-born Frank Gannett was prepared a maxim-minded mother ("Little strokes fell big oaks") and the example of a father who was a failure as a farmer and hotelkeeper. After working his way through Cornell, Newsman Gannett had risen to managing editor of the Ithaca News before he bought a half share of the ailing Elmira Gazette in 1906 (for $20,000), later merged it with the rival Evening Star. Gannett started looking for other money-losing dailies to buy and merge—and soon won fame as the busiest newspaper hyphenator in upstate New York. From Rochester, where he merged the Union & Advertiser with the Times, he went on to combine Utica's Herald-Dispatch and Observer, Elmira's Telegram and Advertiser, Ithaca's News and Journal. He fought Hearst in Rochester (where W.R.H. spent $8,000,000 in a hopeless stab at putting F.E.G. out of business), and was himself driven to the ropes in Brooklyn, where he bought the old Eagle in 1929 and shucked it at a loss of $2,000,000 three years later. He never founded a paper, but he bought with an auditor's sure eye; in all, Publisher Gannett acquired 30 papers (plus a string of TV and radio stations) in 51 years, merged ten, unloaded only three.
In politics, Gannett backed Franklin Roosevelt in his early years, but by 1940 was billing himself as The Man Who Stopped the New Dealers. While he was denounced by F.D.R. as an "isolationist"—and by the late Andrei Vishinsky as a "warmonger"—Gannett in his political philosophy was always animated by the same abhorrence of waste that made him a successful publisher. Though he suffered from diabetes for 33 years, Frank Gannett did not slow perceptibly until 1948, when he had a stroke. Bouncing back, he ran his empire until 1955, when he fractured his spine in a fall. Management and the presidency of the Gannett group has since gone into the hands of able, Gannett-groomed Paul Miller, 51, onetime Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, who believes as firmly as F.E.G. in giving his editors free rein.