The tale of two Daily Mails

Once upon a time, there were two Daily Mails, one in London and one in Charleston, West Virginia, where I toiled for 30 years. There may be other Daily Mails but these are the two I am writing about.

The one in London is a rascal that is so conservative that when Lord Kitchener, Britain’s war secretary died during the Great War, the paper said it was a stroke of good luck for the empire.

The one in Charleston, West Virginia, was the afternoon foil of its liberal morning rival — and business partner — the Gazette. They shared the same business offices and printing press.

Attention Alaskans, Governor Walter Eli Clark salvaged the Daily Mail from bankruptcy in 1914 and 25 years later he finally paid off the debt. He celebrated by instituting annual Christmas bonuses.

The Chilton family owned the Gazette. Its scion, Ned Chilton, was a friend of William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale and carried his column throughout his life despite the Gazette being to the left of Lenin.

In 1987, the family that owned the Daily Mail cashed in its chips and sold the Daily Mail and a bunch of other newspapers and TV stations it had acquired over the years with its profits.

Half the sale money went to building the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences of West Virginia in Charleston and a charitable foundation that was set up to spend itself down in 25 years.

I am not really sure how the Chiltons spent their half of the profits.

Thomson Newspapers in Canada acquired the Daily Mail and its sister newspapers. Thomson ended the Christmas bonuses.

In 1996, a copy editor for the Daily Mail who learned to code — Greg Wood — snagged the DailyMail.com URL for the company. That URL lead to the rival Gazette’s demise.

Two years later, the London paper decided to get into the Internet game. To its horror, it discovered the coveted DailyMail.com URL was already taken.

Its lust for that URL was like Captain Manzini’s lust for the 1928 Porter touring car owned by David Crabtree in My Mother, the Car.

(Poor use of Jerry Van Dyke’s comedic skills doomed the show. Maybe if he were Manzini and Avery Schreiber were Crabtree it would have worked.)

Meanwhile, Thomson saw the Internet coming and got out of the newspaper business. Its CEO was Sam Hindman, a sportswriter from that armpit we call Williamson, West Virginia, who made his name at the Daily Mail. He came back and was its publisher.

The Daily Mail had only one entity interested in acquiring it, the Chilton family. Federal antitrust laws forbade that. The Chiltons got newspaper mogul Dean Singleton to buy the Daily Mail. The idea was the Chiltons eventually would buy it from him.

On July 9, 1998, AP reported, “The Charleston Daily Mail, West Virginia’s second-largest newspaper, is being sold by Thomson Newspapers Inc. to MediaNews Group Inc.

“Terms of the sale were not disclosed today.

“Denver-based MediaNews will add the Daily Mail to its Garden State Newspapers subsidiary. It will rank among MediaNews’ top 10 daily newspapers, said president and chief executive William Dean Singleton.”

The years passed and in 2004, the Chiltons borrowed $55 million to buy Singleton’s “business interests” and agreed to pay him $250,000 a year for 20 years. Their plan was to kill the Charleston Daily Mail because the Chiltons wanted to be the sole voice of unreason in West Virginia’s capital.

This was newspaper thinking. Thomson saw that the Internet inevitably would destroy most newspapers. Craigslist had already replaced most newspaper classified ads, which had been a cash cow for publishers for more than a century.

But the Chiltons had blinders on. They acquired the Daily Mail through a straw purchaser with the aim of shuttering it on March 31, 2005.

I was informed of the pending demise of the paper on February 4, 2005, and told the paper would fold on March 31, 2005, because it was a failed newspaper. My boss told me I would be given two years in severance pay.

Greg Wood set up a blog for me — https://donsurber.blogspot.com — which still exists, although I abandoned it for Substack last month.

In order to close the paper, the Chiltons had to show it was a failing newspaper. To do that, the newspaper canceled subscriptions citing the cost of delivering newspapers to outlying areas.

My daughter, who lived five miles from the newspaper’s offices and printing plant, was told she could not subscribe because she lived too far away. In the same phone call, circulation asked her if she wanted to subscribe to the Gazette.

As inconvenient as shuttering the Daily Mail was, I really did not mind. I figured two years of severance pay would give me enough time to establish myself as a blogger.

Enter the dragon, in this case the Department of Justice. It sued citing the numerous antitrust violations. Advertisers feared a monopoly and a federal judge — John Copenhaver — agreed. This put the whole illegal, immoral and unethical scam on hold.

There went two years’ pay to sit on my rump. The paper later fired me, which was fine because I was 61 and wanted to retire. No, what burns me up is the Gazette was so inept and unartful in its attempt to kill the Daily Mail that it cost me two years’ pay.

As the case slogged through civil court and depositions piled up, it was clear the DOJ had the goods on the Chiltons. It was only a matter of time.

By the end of 2005, my boss asked me if I would move my blog to the Daily Mail. I said sure. I figured blogging there would raise my profile. It did. I got a Drudge Report link once and the traffic was so heavy that it shut down the entire computer system for Charleston Newspapers.

Oops. My bad.

I became 40% of the paper’s online traffic. Another 10% came from people looking for the London Daily Mail online.

You see, instead of wasting $55 million trying — and failing — to kill a rival, the London newspaper invested online.

It built a computer system that could easily handle a dozen Drudge links simultaneously. Its online entity had its own staff and covered U.S. politics better than the jackholes in America cover it.

Did you know there are at least two sides to every political story? Readers of the New York Times do not. They have no reason to believe there are. By giving coverage people would not get otherwise, the London paper is now No. 13 among News & Media Publishers — in the United States — online.

Oh, many of the London paper’s online stories are trash about the Kardashians and that weird princess England has. But it is pretty trash as well as pretty trashy. My point is, instead of placing their heads in the sand, the London paper’s management looked around and saw an opportunity to make money.

They offered the Charleston Daily Mail $1 million for the coveted DailyMail.com URL. Management in Charleston repeatedly said no dice.

In 2010, the DOJ finally agreed to let the Chiltons kill their Daily Mail in five years.

By then, the economics of newspapers had changed, just as Thomson predicted.

The Detroit car companies killed dealerships who took out full-page ads. Amazon killed malls and the ads from those stores. And the Gazette cheered as Democrats killed the coal industry — realizing only later that subscriptions died with coal.

The newspaper industry was — and is — dying.

Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute wrote on April 8, 2013, “Print ad revenues fell by almost 50% in just the last four years, from $37 billion in 2008 to less than $19 billion last year; and by 66% over the last decade, from $56.3 billion in 2002.”

In July 2015, they combined the papers, hiring a few Daily Mail staffers and cynically re-branding the Gazette as the Gazette-Mail. Once the Chiltons killed the Daily Mail, they realized they had killed themselves as well. They could not make payments on that huge kill-the-Daily Mail loan.

What really did them in was not making payments to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, an insurer of pensions created by Congress. PBGC slapped a lien on the newspaper’s building and presses.

In desperation, the Chiltons sold the coveted DailyMail.com URL to the London Daily Mail for $1.5 million. This led to the fall of the House of Chilton, because Dean Singleton sued the Chiltons. He won because the URL belonged to him, not them.

The West Virginia Record reported on September 25, 2017, “Gazette-Mail asks judge to vacate arbitration ruling.”

That ruling awarded Singleton nearly $4 million.

The story said, “MediaNews Group Inc. — the former owner of the Charleston Daily Mail — said it did not consent to the combination of Charleston’s two daily newspapers two years ago and that it is entitled to back-payments, plus payments of an annual management fee until the year 2024.

“The company also claims www.dailymail.com was sold without consent.

“Earlier this month, Edward D. McDevitt, the arbitrator, ruled in MediaNews’ favor.”

The Gazette pleaded that business went south, which of course, it did.

In its response, it said, “First, since the iPhone was introduced in 2010, there has been a surge in ‘electronic media’ that has caused a realignment of advertising budgets with advertisers seeking outlets different from traditional daily newspapers.

“Second, the economy of Southern West Virginia has virtually collapsed; more than half the store fronts of downtown Charleston are empty, the coal mines have closed and the price of oil and gas has made exploration and exploitation of our oil and gas resources uneconomical.”

That was a collapse the Gazette advocated in its foolish campaign against fossil fuels.

Before the Chiltons lost everything, they did everything they had bashed coal companies for doing. The Chiltons froze wages for a decade, stopped paying into the pension fund and skipped paying taxes.

The Chiltons weren’t really robber barons because they thought small. Shoplifter barons, maybe.

The judgment against the Chiltons resulted in the newspaper being sold in bankruptcy court six months later as it was unable to pay its bills. The proceeds went to its creditors. The Chiltons got nothing.

Had the Chiltons followed the rules, the Charleston Daily Mail would have died sooner than 2015 because it was an afternoon newspaper. The Chiltons could have used the money it borrowed to turn that URL into a cash cow.

Meanwhile, the London Daily Mail lives on online, covering American celebrities, politics and sports. There is even a DailyMail.com TV show — in America!

The London paper doing what its Charleston counterpart could have done if only its owners were not petty. It was journalistic Darwinism.

Living happily ever after requires avoiding doing stupid things.

Now for today’s totally scientific poll.