TUESDAY, APRIL 4. 2006
NEWS
Dolph
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You may not recognize his name, but Dolph Simons Jr., chairman of The World Company and editor and publisher of the Lawrence Journal-World, may be the most influential man in Lawrence. It is almost certain that you subscribe to some medium that funnels your money into his company and his pockets — the Lawrence Journal-World, the city's only commercial daily newspaper, or Sunflower Broadband, the only local cable TV service and the dominant high-speed Internet provider.
You may get phone service from him or help with your computers from his company's Geeks on Wheels. The images you can see on computers or cable TV on campus are made possible by a fiber-optic connection linking the University of Kansas to Sunflower Broadband. His company prints USA Today for this region, the Pitch and the newspaper you are reading right now — The University Daily Kansan. If you are a KU student, part of your student fees fund the Kansan, which pays his company more than $300,000 each year for printing the student paper.
Dolph intensely anticipates and worries about competition even though some argue his news, cable and online operations constitute a local media monopoly.
Probe deeper and you find other contradictions.
He is a blue-suited conservative, in politics and in lifestyle, in a city of jeans-clad Bohemians who cast their votes for John Kerry, Kathleen Sebelius and other liberal Democrats. He preaches civic involvement, especially in growth and development, yet local liberals say his paper and cable news channel eschew involvement in their causes. He leads one of the most technologically sophisticated media operations in the world,
yet he types his Saturday column on a 1930s Royal typewriter. His companies are staffed by numerous graduates of the KU School of Journalism, yet most of his donations go elsewhere in the University. He contributes millions to the University, yet bashes it regularly in his weekly column.
A Lawrence media dynasty: the Simons family
Dolph Simons, 76, grew up in Lawrence and graduated with a KU journalism degree. As a young man, he worked abroad at the Times of London and at the Johannesburg Star in South Africa. By 1978, he had succeeded his father, Dolph senior, as publisher and editor of the Journal-World and as president of The World Company.
The company began when W.C. Simons traveled by horse and buggy from St. Joseph, Mo., to Lawrence in 1891 and bought one of seven competing newspapers for $50.
Today the company employs nearly 600 people in Lawrence. About 80 percent of the city's households receive cable from Sunflower, which also offers cable in Eudora, Tonganoxie, Basehor and Piper. Nine out of 10 households in Lawrence receive information from the company's newspapers, Internet editions or cable television each day.
Dolph's davs
Dressed in a suit and tie, Dolph arrives at The World Company headquarters, 609 New Hampshire St., at 7:30 each morning and strolls to the office guarded by a phalanx of receptionists.
He evaluates the morning paper in detail as he sits behind his desk, cluttered with stacks of paper, magazines, books and newspapers. He critiques all aspects of the Journal-World, from how the stories are played and their quality to the advertisements and the quality of newsprint.
He reads several other papers to see how they played the same news. The rest of his day involves meetings both inside and outside headquarters, which may include the KU Hall Center for the Humanities, Midwest Research Institute or the Kansas Bioscience Authority.
He also might meet with local legislators, school board members and superintendents or KU faculty and administrators.
"In most newspaper offices, that's the name of the game," Dolph said. "You're supposed to be involved with the community."
He usually forgoes lunch, opting instead to munch on crackers in his office. He returns at 5 or 6 p.m. to his $1.2-million home near 23rd and Vermont streets surrounded by a large grass yard and flanked by tall trees, its porch adorned with an American flag. When he's not working, he vacations at his lake cabin in Minnesota, fishing and spending time with family.
Dolph's hand in the news
At the Journal-World, he is all business. Dolph meets with reporters and editors in the newsroom to discuss coverage, but avoids social gatherings with reporters at bars that other editors might indulge in.
"Those of us in the business need to conduct ourselves in a manner that reflects well on the business," Dolph said. "I don't believe that a person should be a reporter and be known as a big gambler, or a boozer, or chasing skirts."
Dolph's influence on the content of the paper is considerable, but mostly indirect.
One Journal-World staffer who asked not to be identified by name or gender said Dolph regularly used red grease pencils to write notes to staffers about stories in the Journal-World. The notes both praise and criticize and might suggest possible stories. On a rare occasion, reporters and editors receive a typed note.
On rare occasions, Dolph's influence on content may exceed notes scrawled in red.
Dolph uses the notes because he doesn't communicate by e-mail, the source said.
Two sources at the newspaper, who asked that their names be withheld, said the Journal-World was preparing to publish a story about Jack Schreiner, a Free State High School teacher and basketball coach who was arrested Oct. 19 and charged with window-peeping. Ralph Gage, chief operating officer of The World Company for 36 years, ordered that the story be held, according to one source.
"A lot of people thought it was easily the most important story of the day" one source said.
After complaints from midlevel editors, Gage said the story could be published but that it had to be brief, inside the paper and under a one-column headline, one source said. When the story ran under a three-column headline on page 3B Oct. 26, Gage complained to city editor Mike Shields about the placement of the story in the paper, the two sources said. Shields quit in protest, but returned to work about a week later, the sources said.
"It got delayed and buried," one source said. "It did get published though."
Gage declined to discuss the newsroom controversy over the handling of the Schreiner story or whether Dolph was involved in it, and Dolph never responded to repeated questions about it left by phone and in writing. Kathy Underwood, his receptionist, explained "They feel like they've given you enough of their time and they're through."
Shields declined to be interviewed for this story.
In an earlier e-mail interview, Gage explained that his role in the company was to carry out major policy decisions made by Dolph.
"He tells me what to do, not vice versa," Gage said. "I craft suggestions, put forth ideas.
Former staffers praised him as a person, but complained that depth reporting was discouraged.
Then whatever's decided, it's my job to make it happen."
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN 5A
Kendrick Blackwood, now a staff writer for the Pitch, worked as a reporter for two-and-a-half years in the late '90s, when The World Company began to combine its print, television and online operations, but left the newspaper because he wanted to write longer articles, which he said were discouraged at the Journal-World.
Blackwood said he and other reporters were required to write one article per day and one for the weekend. The paper does well at daily news coverage, he said, but "I wished at the time we could have done more in-depth, longer enterprise articles."
Tim Carpenter was a JournalWorld reporter from 1988, when the newsroom didn't have a fax machine, he said, to 2004 when the company was a leader in multimedia news. He left to take his current job as an investigative reporter at the Topeka Capital-Journal because he wanted to chase bigger stories, he said.
Carpenter called Dolph "a great guy," while acknowledging that Dolph's Saturday column and his politics "ruffled some feathers in Lawrence."
"If they want to write editorials, they should start a paper," he said of Dolph's critics.
"Me and my typewriter know nothing about convergence."
Dan Simons, Dolph's son and president of The World Company's electronics division, smiles when talking about how his technologically-challenged father decided to go multimedia. He explained that his father reads a ton, notices trends and asks good questions.
Dolph refuses to use e-mail and doesn't use a personal computer. His secretaries handle his electronic correspondence, while he types his notes, his letters and his column on a shiny black 1930s Royal typewriter.
"I will admit I am stubborn to change." he said.
"He ingrained in all of us, 'never be complacent,' Simons said. "He has a saying: 'Drive with your bright lights on.'"
Dolph got into cable television even though people advised him against it.
Dolph learned about cable television at newspaper publishers' meetings in New York in the 1960s and when he returned home, he decided to plunge into the cable business, he said.
"My idea was, I'd give it a try and find out it didn't work, rather than sit on our fannies and not do it, then have someone come to town and think, 'Why didn't we do it when we had the chance?' Dolph said.
At first, Dolph wanted the cable operation to be separate from the newspaper.
"I didn't want people to think that they were getting fed out of the same spoon by the same company," he said.
Ralph Gage said at first the newspaper and television station competed fiercely, but management began to see that both operations faced competition from newspapers and TV stations in Topeka and Kansas City.
"Those entities were being gobbled up by big organizations," Gage said about Kansas City and Topeka media. "Big media companies — Knight Ridder, Morris, you name it. It's not like we woke up one morning, but over a short period of time, we certainly did recognize that our future depended on us changing."
In 2001, the company combined its television, print and Internet news operations. Only 100 other media companies had adopted convergence at that time. Gage estimates.
That convergence bothers some, like David Burress, a retired research economist for the KU Policy Research Institute, who frequently writes critical letters to the newspaper.
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