[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 145 (Friday, October 7, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           THE FORMULA OF PYE

 Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, the Star Ledger is our State's 
largest paper. It speaks with a powerful voice on issues of concern to 
New Jersey. It is a big paper--especially if you pick up the Sunday 
edition. It is also a successful one.
  Mr. President, the Star Leger's prominent standing in our State can 
be largely attributed to its editor, Mort Pye. The news and editorial 
comments of his newspaper have informed and entertained. They have 
opened the publics' and public officials' eyes to emerging issues and 
problems that need attention.
  The September issue of New Jersey Monthly ran a profile of this 
remarkable man and the mark that he has made and continues to make on 
his newspaper and our State.
  I ask that the full text of the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

               [From the New Jersey Monthly, Sept. 1994]

                           The Formula of Pye

                           (By Stephen Barr)

       In early May, Star-Ledger editor Mort Pye sat in his Newark 
     office waiting for the arrival of Governor Christine Todd 
     Whitman. Running New Jersey's largest newspaper had always 
     assured him of easy access to the state's chief executives. 
     Tom Kean promptly took his phone calls; Jim Florio 
     occasionally stopped by the newsroom of a lunchtime sandwich, 
     and a private chat. But this encounter would be neither 
     casual nor amiable: Carl Golden, Whitman's press secretary, 
     had contacted Pye to schedule a meeting so that the governor 
     could give him an earful.
       Seven weeks earlier, in her March 15 budget address, 
     Whitman had announced that she was dismantling the state 
     Board of Higher Education. She wanted to give New Jersey's 
     public colleges and universities more autonomy over their 
     affairs. There would still be state oversight, she insisted, 
     but exactly what it would be and how it would work was 
     uncertain.
       With no press leaks before the speech, the governor's 
     announcement hit Pye particularly hard. At the helm of the 
     Star-Ledger since 1963, he considers the newspaper's support 
     for the board's creation in 1967 part of his legacy. ``I had 
     the idea that higher education could be stronger in New 
     Jersey if it had its own separate department,'' Pye says. 
     ``We were involved in [the board's] formation. It was one of 
     the first big things we promoted, so you can understand out 
     feelings about what's happening now.''
       Education editor Robert Braun--who at the time of the 
     announcement had been working for a month on a multipart 
     series about the board's achievements over the past 27 
     years--immediately launched a full-scale assault on the 
     Whitman plan. Day after day, in news stories and twice-weekly 
     opinion pieces, he attacked--often viciously--Whitman's move 
     and anybody who supported it. ``There's no way any governor 
     can say to a newspaper, `Get with the program,''' complains a 
     Whitman-administration insider. ``Her only request was for 
     fairness and balance in the coverage, which was utterly and 
     totally lacking. The way Braun goes from elucidation to 
     advocacy and agitprop, it's disgusting.''
       Pye talked to the governor and then talked to Braun, but 
     little changed and the newspaper continued to attack 
     Whitman's proposal. Pye now disputes the assessment of 
     Braun's work and makes no apologies for the Ledger's 
     campaign--albeit an unsuccessful one--to save the higher-
     education board. Apologizing is not Mort Pye's style.
       For more than three decades, Pye has refused to give in. 
     When he joined the paper as an associate editor in 1958, the 
     Ledger was on shaky ground. Since then, he has not only 
     reversed its fortunes but has built it into the nation's 
     fifteenth largest daily and eleventh largest Sunday paper. 
     Two out of every five New Jersey newspaper readers buy the 
     Ledger. It is the dominant paper even in counties like 
     Middlesex and Morris, which boast their own local dailies.
       Pye has done this while defying conventional wisdom. The 
     Ledger regularly uses its news pages to launch crusades and 
     influence policy. And while its competitors have jazzed up 
     their offerings with vibrant color, zippy graphics, and 
     snappy writing, this slumbering giant has prospered in spite 
     of a heavy gray look and a flat writing style. Pye makes no 
     apologies for that either. ``What you're trying to do is get 
     people addicted to the paper the way it is,'' he explains. 
     ``If you suddenly make drastic changes, then you're telling 
     the reader, `What you're used to is no good, and now we're 
     going to give you something that's really good.' That's an 
     insult.''
       While most contemporary editors might find such an argument 
     ludicrous, there is no debating the fact that the Ledger has 
     spent the last decade gobbling up readers while barely 
     changing its news presentation.
       During his dynastic reign, Mort Pye has done as much to 
     influence state affairs and promote New Jersey's interests as 
     any other individual. He has watched six governors come and 
     go, and the 76-year-old editor shows no signs of coasting 
     toward retirement.
       Pye's achievement of building what appears to be an 
     invincible temple of journalism is rather remarkable when one 
     considers that few people--particularly in journalism--think 
     of the Ledger as a world-class newspaper. Editors and 
     reporters around the sate routinely slam the paper's quality, 
     although they follow and clip the paper religiously. But even 
     as they toss insults, Pye is having the last laugh. To him, 
     it is the readers of the Star-Ledger who count, and in an age 
     when fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers, it is 
     clear they are buying Mort Pye's in droves. ``It is the 800-
     pound gorilla of New Jersey newspapers,'' says Neil Upmeyer, 
     president and editor of the public-policy journal New Jersey 
     Reporter.
       Mort Pye brown-bags his lunch, which today consists of a 
     cheese-and-mustard sandwich on white bread and an apple. 
     We're eating in the conference room adjacent to his humble 
     office (which overlooks a Newark side street and lacks any 
     trappings of power). The surfaces are neat and tidy; the only 
     sign of clutter is on the walls, which are plastered with 
     plaques from business and civic groups and the New Jersey 
     Press Association. Conspicuously missing is journalism's top 
     award--the Pulitzer prize.
       Over the years, Pye has steadfastly remained offstage, 
     ducking interviews and refusing personal publicity. He rarely 
     ventures far from his office, except to visit the newspaper's 
     fifteen bureaus around the state. His idea of a vacation is 
     to drive the back roads of New Jersey with his wife in search 
     of hideaways along the Delaware River or in the mountains. 
     And he shies away from newspaper-industry seminars because, 
     he says, colleagues always ``try to talk me out of what I'm 
     doing.''
       What he's doing--or, more accurately, what he's done--is to 
     take a failing property and make it the most lucrative link 
     in the privately held newspaper chain owned by billionaire 
     brothers Si and Donald Newhouse. How he's done it is the 
     stuff of legend in newspaper circles. By opting for sheer 
     heft--an eleven-person Trenton bureau, a huge sports section, 
     a cadre of specialty writers--he has fashioned the only New 
     Jersey newspaper with truly statewide appeal. He has shrewdly 
     pushed regional and local coverage as suburbs boomed, and 
     added readers as the state's population migrated south and 
     west from the Ledger's base in Essex County. By shamelessly 
     turning his news pages into a soapbox for causes and 
     crusades, he has made the newspaper a major player behind big 
     development projects and countless public-policy initiatives.
       Pye accomplished all of this by stubbornly and doggedly 
     shaping the newspaper into a creature of his own making. ``If 
     there ever was a man dedicated to putting out a newspaper, it 
     is Mort Pye. He is the Star-Ledger,'' says Joseph Carragher, 
     a former Trenton bureau chief. ``He built the paper section 
     by section, as if he had an idea in his head of how he wanted 
     to make the Ledger number one. His imprint is on every page 
     of that paper.''
       Pye, a small man with a frail, reedy voice, has a manner 
     that is both gentle and gracious. When he displays anger, 
     which is rare, staffers say he can manage no more than a 
     high-pitched squeal. Today at lunch he wears a maroon 
     cardigan over a robin's-egg-blue shirt, with a striped tie of 
     mutted browns and blues. As he speaks, he leans back and 
     curls his fingers around his belt. In such asceric environs, 
     his angular jaw and the remains of white hair on his bald 
     head give him a monklike look.
       But his low-key appearance belies a certain impish quality. 
     Below the surface is an intensely competitive man who seems 
     to revel in the brickbars that come his way: that the 
     Ledger's advocacy of issues compromises its journalistic 
     integrity, that the newspaper goes after impersonal 
     bureaucracies (the Department of Motor Vehicles is a 
     favorite) and not public officials, that the look of the 
     paper is woefully out of date, that the writing favors the 
     assembling of facts and statements over style and 
     perspective.
       Releasing a mirthful, almost devilish chuckle, Pye recalls 
     the name of a television talk show that featured media 
     experts dissecting the paper. It was called Pye = Power. 
     ``The approach was to try and show we were up to no good, too 
     big for our britches,'' he says. He had no desire to be part 
     of that dressing-down, but jokes that the real reason he 
     didn't participate was that ``I don't like to go on TV 
     because I don't have the right voice. And no one's interested 
     in seeing my sexy bald head.''
       When Rutgers University president Francis L. Lawrence gave 
     Pye an honorary degree in May, he cited the editor's 
     ``disarmingly modest mien'' as he raised ``the quality of 
     life and caliber of politics'' in the state. Pye hadn't told 
     his staff that he would be receiving the Rutgers accolade, 
     but it's no secret he thrives on just that sort of praise.
       That is evident from a sampling of favorable letters he's 
     saved over the years, dating from 1968 to 1993 
     (interestingly, he throws out all unfavorable letters). One 
     bunch is from business and community leaders, public figures, 
     and just plain readers. In its own way, each letter strikes 
     the same theme--that Pye's newspaper is good for New Jersey. 
     A 1975 note from Lawrence's predecessor, Edward J. Bloustein, 
     is particularly apt:
       ``Dear Mort:
       ``I have only recently returned from an all too brief 
     vacation, but I did not want to let too much time slip by 
     before complimenting the Star-Ledger on the exceptionally 
     fine August series on higher education written by Bob Braun.
       ``It was one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful 
     series that I have seen and I believe that you and Bob and 
     the Star-Ledger have done a great service for both higher 
     education in New Jersey and for the people of this state.''
       Mort Pye got his first taste of newspapering in 1926 at the 
     wizened age of eight. Even then, his focus was decidedly 
     local. A cousin gave him an old typewriter, and he published 
     several issues of the Sumner Park Gazette--a flyer with news 
     about the street he grew up on in Rochester, New York.
       At the University of Illinois, Pye wrote for the Daily 
     Illini and sent dispatches about school activities to the New 
     York Times, which sent back checks for $25 every once in a 
     while. After his sophomore year, he moved to New York and 
     began playing the trombone in swing bands while finishing his 
     degree at City College of New York. He decided to pursue a 
     career in journalism upon graduation in 1940, sending three 
     articles to a newspaper called PM. Two of them--one on 
     efforts to control the weather, the other on suicides in the 
     military--were accepted at a rate of two cents a word.
       At the same time, Pye sent 250 letters to newspapers all 
     over the country. One response came from the Long Island 
     Press, which, like Pye, was based in Jamaica, Queens. 
     Managing editor Ed Gottlieb noticed the local postmark and 
     offered a few dollars a pop for freelance work. Soon Pye was 
     making about $35 a week, which was $10 more than staff 
     reporters, so he was given a job. He continued playing the 
     trombone at dances and bar mitzvahs, which paid more for a 
     Saturday night than he earned in a week at the paper. But 
     after Pye refused one too many weekend assignments, Gottlieb 
     gave him an ultimatum: journalism or the jive joints. Pye 
     chose journalism.
       One day, Gottlieb asked Pye to drive a woman's-page 
     reporter to the dentist. Florence Newhouse was a cousin of 
     the newspaper's owner, S. I. Newhouse, and she had a 
     toothache. ``I drove her in my beat-up old Chevy,'' says Pye, 
     ``and that's how we got acquainted.'' The romance quickly 
     blossomed, and the two were inseparable. When Pearl (as she's 
     known) would get off from the paper at midnight, she'd go to 
     a deli down the street and kill time by helping to make 
     coleslaw and potato salad for the couple who ran the store. 
     When Mort got off two hours later, they'd drive into 
     Manhattan and chase fire engines or hang out in Greenwich 
     Village. They wouldn't get back to Queens until after 
     sunrise.
       Professionally, things were starting to gel as well. One 
     night in 1941, Pye was on the rewrite desk when he got a call 
     from a reporter with a late-breaking story. A woman's body 
     had been found in a Rockaway Beach bungalow. The 23-year-old 
     Pye felt a surge of adrenaline as he scribbled down the 
     details. This was hot stuff: a nude body in a cottage owned 
     by a local politician. He wrote up the story with all the 
     verve and sensation he could muster. ``Blonde Found Dead'' 
     screamed the next day's front page.
       That afternoon, Pye was near a newsstand waiting for Pearl 
     when a well-dressed businessman stopped to look over the rack 
     of a dozen or so newspapers. As he reached for the New York 
     World-Telegram, the Long Island Press seemed to catch his 
     eye. He plunked down his nickel for the Press, and Pye, 
     excited at the idea that his story had sold a newspaper, went 
     up to the man and asked him what had changed his mind. ``I 
     remembered I needed to look for something in the 
     classifieds,'' the man responded.
       Pye relates the tale as an amusing anecdote, but in a way 
     it poignantly reveals the source of his vision for the Star-
     Ledger and one of the secrets of its success. In Pye's view, 
     the more things there are in the paper, the more readers 
     there will be. ``Not everybody is interested in everything, 
     but hopefully everybody is interested in something,'' he 
     says. ``The percentage of people who read a particular story 
     is very low. If you cut out everything with less than 15 
     percent readership, what would you have left? Maybe `Ann 
     Landers,' the horoscope, and a couple of comics.''
       The Star-Ledger was little more than that in 1958, when Pye 
     was named its associate editor, S. I. Newhouse had owned the 
     paper since 1934, and it was the wallflower of the 
     newsstands. ``It was not making a lot of money,'' says 
     Newhouse's son Donald, whose office today is one floor below 
     Pye's. ``It was a marginal operation, and it might have been 
     losing money.''
       The Ledger was a scandal sheet that played up crime 
     stories, carried racing results on the front page, and saw 
     its readership rise when circulation contests were running 
     and then fall when the promotions ended. By the mid-fifties, 
     city editor Arthur Heenan, a staunch supporter of Senator 
     Joseph McCarthy, avidly pushed reporters to root out Reds in 
     New Jersey. All along, the Ledger was Newark's second paper--
     a poor stepchild to the beloved Newark Evening News, which 
     had more readers, national recognition, and a reputation as 
     New Jersey's New York Times.
       After Pye arrived, he walked into the newsroom one day 
     carrying an edition of the Ledger from a year or two before. 
     Noted gangster Longie Zwillinan had killed himself, and the 
     paper ran a main story and eighteen sidebars (accompanying 
     stories) on the suicide. ``Mort said, `This will never happen 
     again,''' Joseph Carragher recalls. ``The whole attitude of 
     the place changed: the philosophy, the tone, what was 
     important and what was not,'' Crime news was relegated to the 
     back of the newspaper, and Pye began demanding a front-page 
     education story every Sunday.
       Pye decided to stay at the Ledger because he liked the New 
     York metropolitan area, but progress was slow and the 
     roadblocks substantial. The newspaper operation was run out 
     of a converted horse barn on Halsey Street, and antiquated 
     presses made it impossible to add more news and better 
     features or build the circulation much beyond what at the 
     time was about 200,000 daily readers.
       The moment of truth came in 1963, when S. I. Newhouse sent 
     Donald, then the general manager of the Jersey Journal, to 
     see Pye. It was their first real conversation, and Donald 
     Newhouse did all the talking. He said the Ledger was in bad 
     shape and of poor quality; it was time to either spend a lot 
     of money to build the paper up or shut it down. ``We had 
     great faith in Mr. Pye's ability as an editor and substantial 
     belief that a properly edited paper could be a successful 
     paper,'' Newhouse says. ``Our decision [to continue] 
     reflected our confidence in him as an individual.''
       Newhouse unequivocally displayed his faith. A new plant 
     with new presses opened in February 1966, and though they 
     would talk frequently, Newhouse never asked Pye for a formal 
     plan to turn the Ledger around. Pye never had a budget, and 
     spent what he wanted to increase news coverage and add staff. 
     Newhouse never balked when his editor asked if he was 
     overstepping his bounds, and he often encouraged him to spend 
     more.
       ``The rules of the game were changing, and Mort and Donald 
     saw that,'' says a Ledger insider. The growth of the suburbs 
     had fostered the building of highways, and the new roads were 
     free and clear before daybreak for the delivery of a morning 
     paper like the Ledger. It was a snap to reach once distant 
     towns and follow readers as they moved into Middlesex, 
     Morris, and Somerset counties and beyond.
       What helped matters was that Richard Scudder, the owner of 
     the Newark Evening News, apparently wasn't seeing what Pye 
     and Newhouse were. He had built a new plant in downtown 
     Newark in the sixties, but delivery of his evening paper 
     during daytime hours proved increasingly difficult: His 
     trucks faced clogged roadways and had trouble getting out to 
     the suburbs. ``The News was never really able to break out of 
     its urban base,'' says former Ledger political reporter Jim 
     McQueeny. ``It had news from around the state, but when 
     people left Newark, they left the News.''
       Pye declines to offer specifics about going head-to-head 
     with the News (``I don't want to talk about them, I want to 
     talk about us,'' he says), but by the end of the sixties, the 
     Ledger had as many readers--about 255,000 daily and 400,000 
     Sunday--as its once seemingly invincible competitor. An 
     eleven-month strike at the News starting in [97] was the 
     final blow; on August 31, 1972, the paper folded. That 
     afternoon, Pye came as close to making a newsroom speech 
     as anyone could remember. ``We never had staff meetings, 
     but Mort talked to employees for about fifteen minutes,'' 
     says Fred Hillmann, a former reporter who was there at the 
     time. ``There was a sense of euphoria, but not so much 
     because we bear the News. It was for the opportunity that 
     we now had.''
       In Pye's cache of letters is this one he received from 
     Scudder in 1984;
       ``Dear Mort:
       ``I am much indebted to your for your help in securing 
     clippings about automobile insurance. The articles are 
     excellent, and so far as I know, are the only thoroughly 
     competent review of the matter by any New Jersey newspaper. 
     Indeed, The Star-Ledger under your direction is, in my 
     opinion, the most powerful force for good in the State today. 
     Your series on pollution by New York was excellent.
       ``It makes me feel less sad about there being no Newark 
     News to see The Star-Ledger do that kind of work so 
     competently.''
       Mort Pye loves New Jersey. For proof, look no farther than 
     his desk, where he keeps a small framed drawing by Bunny 
     Hoest, who pens ``The Lockhorns'' syndicated comic strip. A 
     few years ago, Hoest poked fun at New Jersey in one of his 
     cartoons, and Pye promptly canceled the strip. He reinstated 
     it when Hoest personally called to apologize and promised he 
     wouldn't knock the Garden State again. To seal the deal, the 
     cartoonist sent a drawing of Mr. And Mrs. Lockhorn standing 
     in front of an outline of the state and making a toast: ``We 
     love New Jersey.''
       But Pye's fondness for the state is a lot more complex than 
     that. It exists because he knows that what is good for New 
     Jersey is good for the Ledger. Construction of Giants Stadium 
     started seven years after the Ledger floated the idea. (Pye 
     says he wondered, ``If Green Bay can have a football team, 
     why can't New Jersey?'') The newspaper was also a force 
     behind the building of key highways to the suburbs, like 
     Route 78 and Route 280 (Ledger insiders call the latter the 
     Pyeway). The Liberty Science Center and Newark's new Center 
     for the Performing Arts represent more recent projects that 
     the newspaper has promoted.
       There's probably not a bigger newspaper in the country with 
     a focus so relentlessly local. The Ledger depends primarily 
     on wire-service copy for national and international news; 
     unlike other papers its size, it has no reporters in major 
     cities and foreign capitals. Even the news from its two-
     person Washington bureau always carries a hometown view. ``A 
     reporter in Sussex County at the Ledger is like a New York 
     Times reporter based in London in terms of importance in 
     filling the news pages,'' says Nancy Jaffer, who runs the 
     Morris/Sussex/Warren county bureau.
       It's all part of Pye's basic formula: Build circulation by 
     covering things that interest the largest number of readers--
     but don't leave anything out. Clearly, the Ledger's franchise 
     has been that it offers a lot of stuff for a quarter (75 
     cents for the Sunday edition, whose telephone-book 
     weightiness dwarfs other New Jersey newspapers). It doesn't 
     matter what the stuff is, because there's something for 
     everybody; and at 25 cents, you know you're getting a good 
     deal. ``I've always credited their overall growth to the fact 
     that they've kept the circulation price extremely low,'' says 
     Frank J. Savino, a former advertising executive at the Home 
     News and the Record of Hackensack. The Ledger cost 15 cents 
     as recently as 1990 and remains of the cheapest daily 
     newspapers in the state. ``People bought the paper,'' adds 
     Savino, ``and readers mean advertisers.''
       But many journalists are quick to point out that a large 
     readership doesn't necessarily mean the product is top-
     quality. ``The Star-Ledger's strength is that no other 
     newspaper is as thorough in its coverage of the state. 
     There's no comparable source for the news,'' admits Neil 
     Upmeyer of the New Jersey Reporter. But he feels the paper's 
     photographs are a big culprit in its tedious feel. ``Whether 
     a social event or a legislative event, they're 
     straightforward stock shots. That, as much as the character 
     and length of the stories, leads readers to see the Ledger as 
     a gray, boring paper.''
       Trenton was one of the first beats that Pye beefed up in 
     the midsixties, and one of his first big crusades was against 
     inflated milk prices. ``Mort came in one Monday morning,'' 
     says managing editor Chick Harrison, who was the paper's 
     assistant city editor at the time, ``and he asked, ``Why 
     are they paying less for milk on Long Island than in New 
     Jersey?'' A reporter was assigned to write a series on the 
     issue. Soon afterward, the Legislature changed some 
     regulations and milk prices came down.
       Pye added sports coverage--an area where the News was 
     weak--and also put reporters on the education and legal 
     beats, because news out of the schools and the courts touched 
     so many lives across the state. He ran a Monday party page, 
     with pictures from a dozen or more week-end parties, and he 
     hit on the idea of the multipart series starting on Sunday--
     knowing that readers would be inclined to pick up the daily 
     paper to see what came next.
       Pye also balanced his public-policy crusades with stories 
     that catered directly to politicians and opinion makers. The 
     front page, particularly on Sunday, is the space reserved for 
     New Jersey's elite. Daily stories regularly feature 
     straightforward, unexciting photographs of the state's 
     powerful standing around in suits and ties or pearls and 
     heels, shaking hands, cutting ribbons, or testifying before 
     legislative committees. The dry stuff of politics is spiced 
     with people pleasers, such as lots of sports stories, 
     sometimes two cross-word puzzles, and both ``Ann Landers'' 
     and ``Dear Abby.''
       The voice of the Ledger is best defined by its specialty 
     writers--Bob Braun on education, Herb Jaffe on law, and 
     Gordon Bishop on the environment, to name a few. Over the 
     years, these reporters have been given long leashes; they've 
     mounted their soapboxes, and by dint of the decades spent on 
     them, they have helped make the Ledger influential. They are 
     loathed or revered, depending on what advocacy position they 
     have taken up lately. The specialty reporters are often 
     behind the Ledger's signature multiday series stories that 
     fill page after page of the newspaper.
       Responding to the charge that the Ledger's stories keep 
     going and going longer than the Energizer bunny, assistant 
     managing editor Leonard Fisher says: ``That criticism is 
     fair. We write too long, and part of that is the luxury of 
     space. We're conscious of that problem, but making changes is 
     not easy to do--It can be a battle of egos. Reporters want as 
     much space as the next person, and they don't want their 
     words, their pearls of wisdom, cut.''
       The crusades themselves have also not gone unnoticed in the 
     media at large. Ledger reporters have become a lightning rod 
     for criticism that they hide sometimes virulent opinion 
     behind the guise of objective reporting. ``There's unanimous 
     opinion among journalists in the state that the newspaper 
     often violates journalism standards by editorializing through 
     news articles,'' says Upmeyer.
       Not long after the demise of the Newark Evening News, Pye 
     began to invest heavily in bureaus around the state, a 
     strategy that has proved to be very successful. The paper 
     today has bureaus in 15 out of 21 New Jersey counties, and by 
     adding local coverage in areas of potential growth, the 
     Ledger has been able to attain more circulation than the 
     local daily newspapers.
       Was all of this part of some master plan that Pye had been 
     nurturing for years? Not exactly. The only principle at work 
     was that he wanted to take things slowly. ``In my mind I had 
     a plan, and you had to proceed with caution so you didn't 
     regret what you did,'' Pye says, Former managing editor Andy 
     Stasiuk, who was Pye's top associate until he retired in 
     1992, says there was nothing formal about the way the Ledger 
     worked. ``It's a very informal place,'' he says. ``We don't 
     have meetings and proposals and so forth. This is a catch-as-
     it-flies operation.''
       While Pye's style was quietly cautious, he depended on 
     Stasiuk, a hulking man whose biceps bulged out of his short-
     sleeved shirts, for brashness and motivation. ``Andy got 
     everybody going,'' says Joseph Carragher, ``but Mort was back 
     there telling Andy what he wanted. They were a great good 
     cop-bad cop ream; if Mort wanted something, Andy carried it 
     out, would go the extra mile to please Mort and get the staff 
     to respond.''
       Chick Harrison, Stasiuk's replacement, is a more gentle 
     spirit. Reporters observe a change in the tone of the 
     newsroom. It's a bit quieter with a bit less nervous energy. 
     What hasn't changed is that Mort Pye is in control.
       Pye grabs the previous Sunday's front page and throws it on 
     the table. ``One of the things that pleases me is the play we 
     give a story like that,'' he says, pointing to the launch of 
     a series on biotechnology by Kitta MacPherson, his science 
     editor. ``This is not the kind of thing a tabloid would go 
     crazy over, but it's a big story.'' Why? ``Because 
     [biotechnology] is important to the state,'' he answers. 
     ``It's a positive thing, which I like, and it could be 
     very important to the future of the state in terms of the 
     economy if we're in the forefront. It should get this kind 
     of play because it's more important than another car being 
     hijacked.''
       Pye relates the contents of another love letter to the 
     Ledger, this one from Princeton scientist Joseph Cecchi 
     effusively praising a series on biotechnology written by 
     MacPherson in 1987. ``The last line pleased me quite a bit,'' 
     Pye says. ``It said, `You've made a Star-Ledger reader out of 
     me.'''
       It's just before noon on a Saturday in June. As has been 
     his practice almost every Saturday for more than 30 years, 
     Pye is in the composing room, taking a last look at the 
     layout of Sunday's front page. The Sunday Ledger is his pride 
     and joy. Saturday is a slow news day, so he has always seen 
     Sunday as a chance to push some big idea or to launch a boffo 
     series that would carry through the rest of the week. With 
     728,579 readers--over three times more than its closest 
     competitor--the Sunday Ledger has the advantage of a front 
     page that gets noticed.
       On this Saturday, however, the end of the an era is 
     nearing. The composing room is where the copy, headlines, and 
     pictures are pasted up together on each page, and it used to 
     be a flurry of activity. But almost the entire operation is 
     computerized now; millions of dollars have been spent in 
     recent years to buy state-of-the art presses and the latest 
     technology to go with them. The Sunday front page is one of 
     the last pages to be done the old way, and it, too, will be 
     done electronically in a few months.
       Pye scans the page, which is mounted on a drafting table, 
     and his attention is drawn to the headline of a D day 
     anniversary story by Bill Gannon. It reads Memories Amid 
     Headstones in bold type and capital letters. Wondering if 
     it's too strong, Pye asks a composing-room worker to strip it 
     off and put in an alternative. Memories Among the Headstones, 
     in a lighter typeface with uppercase and lowercase 
     characters. ``That's too weak,'' he says. He asks for the 
     original back. He studies it approvingly but wants a final 
     touch: a thin line under the headline that he feels makes it 
     slightly less overpowering. ``The key to quality is attention 
     to details,'' Pye says after giving the final okay. ``Folks 
     at home aren't going to notice what we're fussing over, but 
     fussy is a good thing. It's the fun part of the business.''
       Curiously, despite his obvious, obsessive interest in 
     tinkering and his willingness to embrace technological 
     innovations, Pye steadfastly refuses to ape his competitors 
     by livening up his sleeping giant with loud graphics, lots of 
     color, and snappy writing. change does occur, but the pace is 
     as leaden as the Ledger's gray look. Since last year, the 
     Sunday front page has had color photographs and a few more 
     varied graphic elements, but that's it.
       Even as television and other media threaten to erode 
     newspaper circulation, Pye, unlike other newspaper editors, 
     has decided not to try to make his paper as fast-paced as 
     watching TV. ``People who are interested in a story are 
     interested in the details,. If you cut a story down to a few 
     paragraphs, it doesn't tell you more than you already know or 
     whet your appetite for more. We try to get all the detail, 
     and that's what brings people to the paper. Apparently 
     there's something right about it.''
       People don't leave the Star-Ledger. Its staff of some 300 
     reporters and editors includes financial writer Alexander 
     Milch, who is nearing 90 and covered the depression for the 
     Newark Evening News, and sports editor Willie Klein, who is 
     80. The office that houses the newspaper's four main 
     editorial writers--three of whom are in their seventies--is 
     fondly called the geriatric ward by some of the younger 
     journalists. Pye makes it clear that he, too, has no plans to 
     retire.
       I ask one editor why staffers stay at the Ledger for life; 
     he says it's because many old-timers have no place else to 
     go. But it's also because the Ledger is a difficult place to 
     leave. Loyalty is based on the ``golden handcuff'' theory; 
     reporters are paid better than many of their unionized 
     counterparts at other newspapers (union is a dirty word at 
     the Ledger), and everybody's on the honor system when it 
     comes to expense accounts and overtime. ``They don't play 
     head games that way,'' one reporter says. When it's time for 
     a raise, Pye makes the call personally, and year-end bonuses 
     are doled out bureau by bureau, as reporters and editors are 
     summoned to Newark for a brief chat with Pye in his office.
       For business writer Iris Taylor, her loyalty to the Ledger 
     was solidified three years ago. During the recession, ad 
     revenues were down at all New Jersey newspapers. Some were 
     forced out of business; others laid off workers. But at the 
     Ledger, a rare memo was circulated. It told staffers that 
     they would never be laid off for economic reasons--a sure 
     sign that profitability was never in jeopardy. ``We don't 
     live with the fear that we won't have a job tomorrow,'' says 
     Taylor. ``This is a lean-and-mean operation. The pay-checks 
     are good and the bonuses are good and there are no fancy 
     anythings.''
       ``No doubt there's plenty of carping among other 
     journalists that the Ledger's stories are long and tedious, 
     that the look is drab and boring, that opinion is passed off 
     as fact,'' adds Upmeyer, ``But a lot of that may also be 
     professional jealousy. Reporters aspire to the New York Times 
     or the Philadelphia Inquirer for the professional prestige, 
     but they aspire to the Star-Ledger because they will get paid 
     more and they will write for a paper with a huge circulation. 
     You wouldn't hear a reporter carp if Mort offered him a 
     job.''
       Some of the Ledger's top editors are bucking the work-till-
     you-drop motif, however. The newsroom was stunned two years 
     ago when Andy Stasiuk, who was 69 at the time, announced he 
     was retiring to Las Vegas after 38 years with the paper. 
     Chick Harrison, who moved up from assistant managing editor 
     when Stasiuk left, told me that he may retire as early as 
     next year and certainly within two years, even though he just 
     turned 65.
       Former assistant city editor Isabelle Spencer once told me 
     that she thought Pye, Stasiuk, and Harrison would all leave 
     at once. But that wouldn't have been Pye's style. No matter 
     how prepared their replacements might be, that would be quite 
     a void to fill. If anything is obvious, it is that Pye 
     believes in gradual change, and with one top editor bowing 
     out every few years, the organization can better absorb what 
     is a wrenching but ultimately unavoidable transition in 
     leadership.
       Whether Mort Pye will ever be ready to step down--say on 
     May 28, 1998, his 80th birthday--may depend on how wise 
     Christie Whitman's decision to abolish the Board of Higher 
     Education turns out to be, Pye assures me that even though he 
     couldn't dissuade the governor from radically changing state 
     oversight of higher education, the Ledger and its resident 
     pit bull, Bob Braun, will stay on top of developments under 
     Whitman's system.
       Pye won't say it, but perhaps what's at stake is the one 
     accolade that has eluded him: the Pulitzer prize. ``Mort has 
     done something that few in the newspaper business can claim, 
     but he hasn't been justly rewarded,'' says Joseph Carragher, 
     who believes that Braun's recent work on the board's 
     dissolution was Pulitzer-quality.
       I mention to Carragher that Braun won't even have a chance 
     at such an award unless he can expose the flaws in Whitman's 
     policy and force her to admit that her action was foolhardy. 
     ``It may not happen this year.'' he concedes, ``but maybe 
     next year or the year after. It would be the crowning touch 
     if Mort won the Pulitzer for his education coverage.''
       In the interim, Mort Pye will just keep selling papers--one 
     hefty issue at a time.

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