Billionaire financier F. Warren Hellman is already beloved in his native San Francisco for underwriting an eccentric music festival called Hardlly Strictly Bluegrass.
But if the California mogul can figure out how to save another bit of endangered Americana, the community newspaper, he will surely be regarded as a national, as well as a local treasure.
Hellman announced last Friday that he and a team of business and media experts are working on a plan for a new, sustainable model for community journalism in the Bay Area.
While his immediate focus is on his hometown, where the Hearst Co.-owned San Francisco Chronicle has been hemorrhaging staff and money, Hellman has his eye on a model that might be adopted across the country where intense financial pressures are driving many papers into bankruptcy.
“If we can conceptualize a model and bring it to life here, the world will take notice,” he said. “It is that simple.”
A spokesman for Hellman told the the San Francisco Business Times that the team includes Andrew Woeber, managing director of investment bank Greenhill and Co.’s San Francisco office, consultant Susan Hirsch and representatives of the Media Workers Guild. Other participants in the regular meetings Hellman has convened include San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, former Chronicle Publisher and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk and executives of several local investment funds.
He said the group has adopted a two-month timeline for reporting back to the community.
Hellman said he began thinking about the newspaper conundrum in late February when the Hearst Corp. announced plans to sell or shutter the 144-year-old Chronicle “within weeks” unless it could win significant concessions from two major unions, the Media Workers Guild and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The unions agreed to concessions that cut dozens of jobs for yet another downsizing, but the paper is by no means out of the woods.
Hellman, now in his 70s, has a decades-long reputation as a financial whiz.
The youngest person (at age 28) ever to have been named a partner at now-defunct Lehman Brothers, he has been a director of more than a dozen corporations and serves as a member of the University of California Walter A. Haas School of Business Advisory Board.
After deciding to return to San Francisco, he co-founded Hellman & Friedman, LLC, the San Francisco-based private equity investment firm, in 1984 and has been a successful investor and philanthropist ever since. He has chaired the board of The Magnes Museum, and his wife, Chris, has chaired the San Francisco Ballet. The couple also funds the San Francisco Free Clinic, an organization that provides free health care to the needy and is run by one of their children.
But even he admits that saving newspapers is a tougher challenge than it first looked.
“In the beginning, this may have looked like addition and subtraction,” he admitted, “but in reality we’re doing advanced trigonometry here. The one thing I am certain about is that this region deserves the best journalism, and that a way must be found to ensure that we continue to get it for decades to come.”
He said his group is looking around the world to see if there are viable models that can be emulated and, if not, “how do we develop one?”
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1 Comments
#1. johnnyc 05.14.2009
He said his group is looking around the world to see if there are viable models that can be emulated and, if not, “how do we develop one?”
Indeed his business methodology will be his first notion(look to see if some elses idea provides solution). However, what we see here is that the politics (yes indeed), business models and the overall national press markets economic implementaion is the very “ROOT” cause of this predicament that Hellman perpetuates. The solution must be counteractive to this model. As a result I think you will see degraded quality, information control and increased complexity for the paper instead of a simple solution sadly. He hasn’t the solution but actually the reason for its demise….
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