Gail Stahle is the publisher who created the only new Utah daily in nearly 90 years, the Spectrum in St. George. He then threw a scare into the other Salt Lake papers by starting an ambitious Salt Lake-Davis "total market" free suburban weekly, also called the Spectrum. He abandoned his Utah publications when the thin financial ice caved in 10 years ago. But now he's back as a large presence in Utah media.
Last December Stahle bought out the Green Sheet newspapers, which have a virtual monopoly on community weekly publication in Salt Lake County. He also now owns the Davis County Clipper and a free-distribution advertising paper or "shopper" in Bountiful.The circulation of these papers totals about 100,000, suddenly making Stahle the second-largest publisher in the state in number of copies distributed.
When Stahle took over, the regionalized Green Sheet papers were known as the Murray Eagle, the West Valley View, the South Valley Sentinel and the Green Sheet. But "Green Sheet" was a misnomer, since the papers had not been printed on green cover pages since a newsprint shortage drove up colored newsprint prices years ago.
- SO STAHLE RETAINED the Murray Eagle masthead, a famous old name in Utah publishing, and renamed the other papers the West Valley Eagle, South Valley Eagle and the News Eagle. All the Eagle papers except the News Eagle are distributed by carrier kids who get the franchise for $5 and collect what the householder is willing to pay. The News Eagle incorporates parts of the other papers and goes by third-class mail to households that aren't covered by the carriers.
Publishing these papers, which had been sliding, is an act of pluck and vision, particularly in an era when newspaper circulations overall are at best just holding their own and the industry has just been through an advertising recession.
It also is an act of faith, as it was for Jim and Bette Cornwell. They came out of Nebraska to purchase the senile and barely gasping Murray Eagle in the mid-1950s and from it spun off the Green Sheets. They had many naysayers who thought they were flogging a dead horse, but they confounded them by making a great success of the papers. Their weeklies supplemented the Salt Lake dailies by dealing with readers on a more local level than possible in the metropolitan press. They also helped give their communities an identity in the urban sprawl.
The Cornwells sold out in 1984 to a young Eastern publisher, Peter Bernhard, a principal in Diversified Suburban Newspapers. Bernhard was for several years an absentee owner, busy running other papers in Alameda and Oakland, Calif.
- HIS SALT LAKE PAPERS NEVER DID fulfill Bernhard's hopes for 120,000 circulation blanketing the entire county south of 2100 South, although the company was aiming to deliver a free paper to every household in the suburbs. Bernhard pulled entirely out of Sandy in recent years.
His brother Andy, who runs the Park Record and Network magazine and still owns the Murray Printing Co., says "it made sense" for the Bernhards to sell out in order to concentrate on their growing Park City venture.
The announcement of Stahle's purchase of the Green Sheets called Stahle, accurately, "a veteran newspaper magnate." In 1976 Stahle founded the Spectrum, then known as Color Country Spectrum, as a daily covering five southern Utah counties with editorial offices in St. George and Cedar City. The concept was excellent and the timing was good but the venture was undercapitalized. When Stahle lost his shirt, as he puts it, he sold to the gigantic Thomson chain in 1984.
The Spectrum weekly, published by Stahle's Spectrum Press in Bountiful, covered about 90 percent of the households in Salt Lake and Davis counties. When it folded in 1984 he moved to Arizona to establish a printing business. He returned in 1985 to run the Clipper for his father, John, a master publisher who owned it from the time he got it from his father, John Sr., in 1954 until he died in 1989. Stahle is now buying the paper from the estate.
- THE CLIPPER for years has been known for its excellent news and feature photos. Stahle has built on that reputation by using full-color pictures on page one and section pages. Two editions a week are produced, a full-sized or broadsheet paper midweek and what Stahle calls a "long-boy tabloid" on weekends. The tabloid carries four-color comics.
All of Stahle's papers are now printed in the Bountiful plant, though the Eagle editorial operation remains in quarters rented from Murray Printing.
Stahle's Green Sheet acquisitions were greeted with little fanfare even in the papers themselves. The announcement was carried on page one but no editorial comment accompanied it. Changes have been gradual, though the first Stahle issue had a page one color photo. Initially all the Green Sheet employees, including the four news workers, were retained. The editor, Michelle Bartmess, resigned to take another job in March.
- ON THE BUSINESS SIDE, Stahle has brought in a sure hand and longtime associate, John Rogers, as general manager. Rogers was general manager and publisher of the Daily Spectrum and before that owner and publisher of the weekly Washington County News. He was also operations manager at Spectrum Press.
The new Eagle's managing editor, Ralph Goff, wants to get a dialogue going with his readers and has invited them to help plan what the paper should be. Though he admits that so far most of the changes have been cosmetic, "the time has come," he told readers in a May 12 issue, "to begin taking a look at what is getting into print. . . . This newspaper has always focused on local news. . . . However, the question is what does `local community' entail. . . . I need your help in coming to grips with what the community is. . . ."
Seeing the papers retrace this voyage of discovery should be interesting.