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Street Talk Captain of the News

Bob Mong sits at the helm of the Dallas Morning News as it enters stormy seas. What’s his plan? Be aggressive and very, very smart.
By MIKE SHROPSHIRE |

BOB MONO, PRESIDENT OF THE DALLAS Morning News, has his work cut out for him. Although the Columbia Journalism Review reported last November that the News was ranked No. 5 on the list of America’s Best Newspapers-behind only the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times-feat doesn’t mean the News doesn’t have its challenges. The biggest one is the stock price of parent A.H. Belo, which hovers in the Dow Jones quarantine zone, mainly because of worries about the News’ financial performance. Belo’s California newspaper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported a remarkable 75 percent increase in operating cash flow for the first quarter of this year, and its East Coast paper, the Providence Journal, posted a more-than-respectable 18 percent gain. But the newspaper division as a whole was up only nine percent. The News represents 50 percent of Belo’s total newspaper circulation, so from the numhers (the quarterly report is silent on the News’ performance, leaving analysis to do their own math) it appears the Dallas daily suffered as much as a 30 percent decline from the previous year. While general advertising was up thanks to dot.coms and other technology companies, retail and classifieds were down. How far down they can go is a question that puts Belo executives on permanent edge.

To forge an answer to that very’ critical question, Belo chose Bob Mong, an editor who is not only well-respected among the rank and file, but by all reports is also very smart. Thus Mong, who is frequently referred to as the “obscure genius” around the newsroom, has emerged near the top of the Belo heap in a role that also makes him one of the most influential people in Dallas.



JOURNALISM EXCEEDS ALL ELEMENTS of the American work force when it comes to individuals who entered the trade through accidental or even serendipitous circumstances. So Bob Mong is at least typical in that regard. He grew up in Eaton in Southwest Ohio and attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania, a Quaker institution. Mong’s career ambition was to become a college president, but when his father was direly injured in a car wreck, he sought more immediate work. “I had a romantic view of newspaper reporters.” he says. Mong knocked on the front doors of small- to-midsized papers in Indiana and Ohio and was usually shown the rear exit.

Mong finally found work in Richmond, Ind. His most dazzling contribution to the paper came when he covered the controversy over a motorcycle fatality at the state tine. A jurisdictional dispute arose when it was determined that the motorcycle remained in Indiana while the body landed in Ohio. Mong. too, would land in Ohio when he moved up to a job working in a county bureau of the Cincinnati Post. The harsher acts of nature become the occupational boon of roofing contractors, morticians, and news reporters, and it was such a calamity that caused Mong’s addiction to his craft. “There was a tornado, a bad one, and for the first time, [ got to watch the real pros at work and see how they covered an event like that. It was impressive.” Mong moved next to the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. Here, Mong assumed a job editing on the city desk and discovered that the real stories occur “with not necessarily the bare facts, but what’s unwritten in the space between the margins.”

While the Madison paper was the birthplace of Bob Mong’s future as an editor, the town also bestowed on him the lone genuine setback in his career. “The printers went on strike arid some of us on the editorial staff honored their picket line,” says Mong. “So we got fired.”

He embarked on a job search that took him throughout the upper Midwest and to the West Coast. A stopover in Dallas in June 1979 established Mong’s enduring faith that timing is as important as good work habits. His visit to the News coincided with an opening that had suddenly materialitzed for the post of night assignments editor on the city desk.

Another accident of timing would eventually prove far more telling than the availability of the job opportunity. When Mong arrived at the News, young Robert Dechard was at work implementing a grand scheme that would transform the newspaper from the staid family heirloom that was known as “the Morning Snooze” to a quality paper. A national recruiting search brought Burl Osborne to town from an AP career to whip the paper into the shape.

Mong, who quickly demonstrated the innovative skills the Dechard regime was demanding of its editorial force, had already advanced to special assignments and projects editor when he received a mandate to overhaul the business section, which at the lime was little more than “a couple of business pages consisting of market results at the back of the sports section.” Mong’s creation of “Business Tuesday” and other improvements were the staging area for the trip up the Belo ladder.

“The one thing thai Bob did early in his career that stands out was that he realized the editors at the News were really turf-con-science-a lot of them weren’t even on speaking terms,” says News deputy managing editor Howard Swindle. “He realized that the paper couldn’t begin to compete with the Herald if we were at war with ourselves. He made steps to do something about that at a point in his career when he didn’t have the clout. But he did it. and basically, he woke the sleeping giant up.”



PROBABLY THE MOST FORTUITOUS MOMent in Mong’s news career-again an accident of timing-happened about 6:30 on an August afternoon in 1985 when he held the post of assistant managing editor. Mong got word from the city desk that a Delta jet had just crashed-one of the lop local news stories of the decade. With Mong coordinating the coverage, the News outperformed the Herald and, in the process, took the lead in the newspaper battle.

But Mong’s own trail would take an odd turn in 1995. As managing editor of the News, Mong rejoiced in the notion that he had the “best job in the world.” He was presiding over the newsroom at a modem American media powerhouse. His outer office was decorated by framed representations of the six Pulitzer Prizes the newspaper had gathered in six separate categories since 1985.

But his domain was about to change drastically. When Mong saw the “see me ASAP” message from Osborne sitting conspicuously on his desk, his reaction was a natural one: “Did I screw something up?” He would learn right away that his unscheduled meeting with Osborne involved something even more unsettling. A.H. Belo was venturing headlong into an acquisition phase. One of its new properties was a newspaper in Owensboro, Ky. Osborne asked Mong if he wouldn’t mind trekking off to the banks of the Ohio River to serve as publisher of a product called the Messenger-Inquirer. “That was a complete surprise,” Mong recalls. “When I walked out of Burl’s office. 1 felt, well, stunned.”

The plan was this: Mong would be farmed out to Owensboro to assume a newspaper position much like the one that Osborne occupied in Dallas, one that involved bottom lines as much as it did headlines. The “invitation” to travel to Kentucky involved a sort of tacit understanding that if things did not work out. Mong might return to his previous post in Dallas. “He knew and we knew that he’d be back in Dallas,” insists Osborne.

Mong was being presented with a peculiarly packaged promotion. “I suppose that there was ample speculation that 1 had committed some kind of major transgression and was being shuttled off the end of the earth,” Mong says.



MONG DID WELL ENOUGH IN KEN-tucky to be dispatched to Stanford for an accelerated course in finance in the summer of 1997. After that little reeducation, he was returned to Dallas. On October 1, 1998, he was appointed president and general manager of the News. Now Mong, 51, faces a fierce and formidable array of tasks, including responding to some harsh reviews from “media professionals” on the current product: “It’s about as stimulating as reading a seed catalog” and “it reads like it’s being edited by lawyers.”

“Since the Herald shut down, we’ve become even more active in expanding our resources.” says Mong in defense of the News. “Publications that survived newspaper wars in other markets have not done thai.” To illustrate his point. Mong brings up the paper’s Technology, Discovery, and Religion sections, not to mention the upcoming Personal Finance section. These projects are not cheap and require, according to Mong, “extensive pre-planning and a lot of guts.”

Reporting resources will gain additional muscle, Mong says, through a synergistic effort that involves all of the Belo holdings. “In other words, we are exchanging news with the TV stations. Before, we couldn’t do that, because of FCC anti-trust concerns. When I was managing editor, we wouldn’t even put one of our reporters on Channel 8*s helicopter. We were essentially in competition with the TV station on the other side of our parking lot, and the only thing we thought we were allowed to share was our library.”

He also confirms that a gradual redesign of the newspaper will take place, enhanced by a new printing press that cost $32 million. The redesign will be subtle. “Kind of like the New York Times” Mong says. “They had a re-design and nobody noticed.”

What does he think about predictions, the latest coming from Warren Buffet, that newspapers are a disappearing species? “They said that newspapers were dying when radio was invented.” says Mong. “The same thing with TV. And then cable. Of all the popular forms of media, the No. 1 favorite of the American consumer remains the Sunday newspaper.”

Despite the fact that his every move is seemingly examined by a multitude of readers and Belo stockholders, Mong still likes his job. “1 still look forward to going to work every day,” he says. “But when I pause to consider that about a million people a day are reading at least some portion of this newspaper, the thought becomes a little daunting.”

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