Tuesday, April 4, 2006
A framed piece of paper hangs on the wall above a television broadcasting CNN in the office of Dolph Simons Jr., one of the few people in Lawrence known largely by his first name.
In 1891, Dolph’s grandfather W.C. Simons scrawled in black ink on a small note his first day’s business. “Sold Papers,” it reads.
Dolph, twiddling his glasses with stout fingers, dark hair neatly combed straight back, explains, “I keep it up there as a reminder — that shows that anybody can come to town and get into the business and you better be careful because if they work hard, and you don’t, you’re in trouble.”
You may not recognize his name, but Dolph Simons Jr., chairman of The World Company and editor and publisher of the Lawrence Journal-World, may be the most influential man in Lawrence. It is almost certain that you subscribe to some medium that funnels your money into his company and his pockets — the Lawrence Journal-World, the city’s only commercial daily newspaper, or Sunflower Broadband, the only local cable TV service and the dominant high-speed Internet provider.
You may get phone service from him or help with your computers from his company’s Geeks on Wheels. The images you can see on computers or cable TV on campus are made possible by a fiber-optic connection linking the University of Kansas to Sunflower Broadband. His company prints USA Today for this region, the Pitch and the newspaper you are reading right now — The University Daily Kansan. If you are a KU student, part of your student fees fund the Kansan, which pays his company more than $300,000 each year for printing the student paper.
Dolph intensely anticipates and worries about competition even though some argue his news, cable and online operations constitute a local media monopoly.
Probe deeper and you find other contradictions.
He is a blue-suited conservative, in politics and in lifestyle, in a city of jeans-clad Bohemians who cast their votes for John Kerry, Kathleen Sebelius and other liberal Democrats. He preaches civic involvement, especially in growth and development, yet local liberals say his paper and cable news channel eschew involvement in their causes. He leads one of the most technologically sophisticated media operations in the world, yet he types his Saturday column on a 1930s Royal typewriter. His companies are staffed by numerous graduates of the KU School of Journalism, yet most of his donations go elsewhere in the University. He contributes millions to the University, yet bashes it regularly in his weekly column.
A Lawrence media dynasty: the Simons family
Dolph Simons, 76, grew up in Lawrence and graduated with a KU journalism degree. As a young man, he worked abroad at the Times of London and at the Johannesburg Star in South Africa. By 1978, he had succeeded his father, Dolph senior, as publisher and editor of the Journal-World and as president of The World Company.
The company began when W.C. Simons traveled by horse and buggy from St. Joseph, Mo., to Lawrence in 1891 and bought one of seven competing newspapers for $50.
Today the company employs nearly 600 people in Lawrence. About 80 percent of the city’s households receive cable from Sunflower, which also offers cable in Eudora, Tonganoxie, Basehor and Piper. Nine out of 10 households in Lawrence receive information from the company’s newspapers, Internet editions or cable television each day.
Dolph’s days
Dressed in a suit and tie, Dolph arrives at The World Company headquarters, 609 New Hampshire St., at 7:30 each morning and strolls to the office guarded by a phalanx of receptionists.
He evaluates the morning paper in detail as he sits behind his desk, cluttered with stacks of paper, magazines, books and newspapers. He critiques all aspects of the Journal-World, from how the stories are played and their quality to the advertisements and the quality of newsprint.
He reads several other papers to see how they played the same news. The rest of his day involves meetings, both inside and outside headquarters, which may include the KU Hall Center for the Humanities, Midwest Research Institute or the Kansas Bioscience Authority.
He also might meet with local legislators, school board members and superintendents or KU faculty and administrators.
“In most newspaper offices, that’s the name of the game,” Dolph said. “You’re supposed to be involved with the community.”
He usually forgoes lunch, opting instead to munch on crackers in his office. He returns at 5 or 6 p.m. to his $1.2-million home near 23rd and Vermont streets, surrounded by a large grass yard and flanked by tall trees, its porch adorned with an American flag. When he’s not working, he vacations at his lake cabin in Minnesota, fishing and spending time with family.
Dolph’s hand in the news
At the Journal-World, he is all business. Dolph meets with reporters and editors in the newsroom to discuss coverage, but avoids social gatherings with reporters at bars that other editors might indulge in.
“Those of us in the business need to conduct ourselves in a manner that reflects well on the business,” Dolph said. “I don’t believe that a person should be a reporter and be known as a big gambler, or a boozer, or chasing skirts.”
Dolph’s influence on the content of the paper is considerable, but mostly indirect.
One Journal-World staffer, who asked not to be identified by name or gender, said Dolph regularly used red grease pencils to write notes to staffers about stories in the Journal-World. The notes both praise and criticize and might suggest possible stories. On a rare occasion, reporters and editors receive a typed note.
Dolph uses the notes because he doesn’t communicate by e-mail, the source said.
On rare occasions, Dolph’s influence on content may exceed notes scrawled in red.
Two sources at the newspaper, who asked that their names be withheld, said the Journal-World was preparing to publish a story about Jack Schreiner, a Free State High School teacher and basketball coach who was arrested Oct. 19 and charged with window-peeping. Ralph Gage, chief operating officer of The World Company for 36 years, ordered that the story be held, according to one source.
“A lot of people thought it was easily the most important story of the day,” one source said.
After complaints from mid-level editors, Gage said the story could be published but that it had to be brief, inside the paper and under a one-column headline, one source said. When the story ran under a three-column headline on page 3B, Oct. 26, Gage complained to city editor Mike Shields about the placement of the story in the paper, the two sources said. Shields quit in protest, but returned to work about a week later, the sources said.
“It got delayed and buried,” one source said. “It did get published though.”
Shields declined to be interviewed for this story.
Gage declined to discuss the newsroom controversy over the handling of the Schreiner story or whether Dolph was involved in it, and Dolph never responded to repeated questions about it left by phone and in writing. Kathy Underwood, his receptionist, explained, “They feel like they’ve given you enough of their time and they’re through.”
In an earlier e-mail interview, Gage explained that his role in the company was to carry out major policy decisions made by Dolph.
“He tells me what to do, not vice versa,” Gage said. “I craft suggestions, put forth ideas. Then whatever’s decided, it’s my job to make it happen.”
Former staffers praised him as a person, but complained that depth reporting was discouraged.
Kendrick Blackwood, now a staff writer for the Pitch, worked as a reporter for two-and-a-half years in the late ’90s, when The World Company began to combine its print, television and online operations. He left the newspaper because he wanted to write longer articles, which he said were discouraged at the Journal-World.
Blackwood said he and other reporters were required to write one article per day and one for the weekend. The paper does well at daily news coverage, he said, but “I wished at the time we could have done more in-depth, longer enterprise articles.”
Tim Carpenter was a Journal-World reporter from 1988, when the newsroom didn’t have a fax machine, he said, to 2004 when the company was a leader in multimedia news. He left to take his current job as an investigative reporter at the Topeka Capital-Journal because he wanted to chase bigger stories, he said.
Carpenter called Dolph “a great guy,” while acknowledging that Dolph’s Saturday column and his politics "ruffled some feathers in Lawrence.”
“If they want to write editorials, they should start a paper,” he said of Dolph’s critics.
“Me and my typewriter know nothing about convergence.”
Dolph refuses to use e-mail and doesn’t use a personal computer. His secretaries handle his electronic correspondence, while he types his notes, his letters and his column on a shiny black 1930s Royal typewriter.
“I will admit, I am stubborn to change,” he said.
Dan Simons, Dolph’s son and president of The World Company’s electronics division, smiles when talking about how his technologically-challenged father decided to go multimedia. He explained that his father reads a ton, notices trends and asks good questions.
“He ingrained in all of us, ‘Never be complacent,’” Simons said. “He has a saying: ‘Drive with your bright lights on.’”
Dolph learned about cable television at newspaper publishers’ meetings in New York in the 1960s and when he returned home, he decided to plunge into the cable business, he said.
Dolph got into cable television even though people advised him against it.
“My idea was, I’d give it a try and find out it didn’t work, rather than sit on our fannies and not do it, than have someone come to town and think, ‘Why didn’t we do it when we had the chance?’” Dolph said.
At first, Dolph wanted the cable operation to be separate from the newspaper.
“I didn’t want people to think that they were getting fed out of the same spoon by the same company,” he said.
Ralph Gage said at first the newspaper and television station competed fiercely, but management began to see that both operations faced competition from newspapers and TV stations in Topeka and Kansas City.
“Those entities were being gobbled up by big organizations,” Gage said about Kansas City and Topeka media. “Big media companies — Knight Ridder, Morris, you name it. It’s not like we woke up one morning, but over a short period of time, we certainly did recognize that our future depended on us changing.”
In 2001, the company combined its television, print and Internet news operations. Only 100 other media companies had adopted convergence at that time, Gage estimates.
That convergence bothers some, like David Burress, a retired research economist for the KU Policy Research Institute, who frequently writes critical letters to the newspaper. He complains that The World Company’s operations constitute a classical media monopoly in Lawrence. A few other information sources exist in the city, such as the Kansan, but the student newspaper cannot compete in the general community, Burress says.
Because of The World Company’s monopoly, businesses feel pressured to avoid placing advertisements in alternative papers, such as The Lawrencian, he says. Burress cites the failures of a number of weeklies in Lawrence over the years.
Businesses “feel that if they advertise in weeklies, they are less likely to get free publicity in the Journal-World,” Burress said. “That’s a monopolistic practice.”
Similar to cable companies in most cities, Sunflower Broadband is able to charge more money for its cable service because it has little competition, he said.
“Cable prices are unreasonable everywhere — it’s a license to print money,” Burress said.
Dolph said major newspaper companies have tried to move into Lawrence.
“You’ve got Kansas City, with their new press coming up ... I know damn well they’re going to try to come here. Topeka tries to come in here,” Dolph said.
“Sure, I can appreciate and understand that somebody would say, ‘My God, what a monopoly.’ And in one sense, it would appear that way. And in one sense, it is. But that doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t come in here and start something,” Dolph said.
Dolph said he already has competition in Lawrence, pointing to Internet service from AT&T; (formerly SBC), newspapers in Topeka, Leavenworth and Ottawa, and radio and television stations in Kansas City and Topeka. Dolph even sees the Kansan as a local competitor for newspaper advertising. He refused to be photographed for this story, although he sat for one to accompany an article about him in The New York Times. The Kansan purchased that photo from the Times for this article.
Paul Jess, a retired KU journalism professor who was general manager of the Kansan from 1980-1982, said he remembered The Associated Press suddenly began charging the Kansan the higher commercial rate instead of the university rate for wire stories and photos. The AP is a cooperative owned by the newspapers it serves — including the Kansan and the Journal-World.
Jess recalled that a student on the advertising side decided to expand Kansan circulation by placing boxes filled with Kansans throughout Lawrence. An AP employee called shortly after and told Jess that the Kansan would be charged the higher commercial rate for articles and photos.
While the AP didn’t tell Jess whether anyone had complained, the AP justified its decision because the Kansan was “competing,” Jess said. Jess said it was a “valid assumption” that the complaint came from Dolph, the Kansan’s only local competitor.
Dolph denies that The World Company played a role in the price increase.
Tom Eblen, general manager of the Kansan from 1986 to 2001, said his relationship with Dolph was positive and that the printing quality of the Kansan improved greatly when The World Company began printing it — in color and not in just black and white.
Malcolm Gibson, current general manager of the Kansan and a member of the journalism faculty, said he didn’t know of a better relationship between a city and a college newspaper than the one between the Journal-World and the Kansan.
Today the Kansan pays the lower university rate for AP articles and photos and Gibson said he hoped the Kansan would soon circulate around town again.
“Everything I’ve sought to accomplish with the Journal-World, I have, with respect to the AP rules, too. And I expect to accomplish everything,” Gibson said.
The University
Ann Brill, dean of the KU School of Journalism, converses with Dolph about once a month, she said. The World Company’s leadership in multimedia news perfectly complements the curriculum of the school, which is a national leader in multimedia news, she said.
Dolph and his two sons, Dan and Dolph III, president of the company’s newspaper division who is known in the company as D-three, are members of the William Allen White Foundation board of trustees and the Dean’s Club, a group of donors who give $1,000 or more a year to the school.
Brill said Dolph has been generous to the school, but could not reveal exact amounts because of confidentiality rules.
“I think his contributions to the school have been more in terms of resources,” she said.
Dolph supports the school by hiring students and providing interns at the Journal-World with unpaid instruction from the paper’s staff, Brill explained. People have told her that Dolph speaks highly of the school as well, she said.
“Because he is a person of influence, much more beyond Lawrence than a lot of people realize, that helps that the local publisher thinks highly of what you’re doing,” Brill said.
Dolph declined to reveal the sum of his contributions, and the KU Endowment Association, a private entity, is not required to provide that information unless donors agree, said spokeswoman Jen Humphrey.
Dolph and his family’s most recent contribution to the University amounted to $2.125 million, part of an $8.5-million donation to the KU Endowment Charitable Gift Fund, Humphrey said. She explained that another $2.125 million of that money went to the Douglas County Community Foundation. Endowment allows donors to designate charitable recipients outside the University. The Simons family will decide where the remaining $4.25 million will be distributed — either to the University or to the Douglas County Community Foundation, Humphrey said.
Dolph said that his donations had funded the Simons Media Center inside the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, the Dolph Simons Room inside the Wagnon Student Athlete Center, and that he had contributed to various schools on campus.
“It’s not designed so that we give more to one particular school, or to one particular program than to another one,” he said.
Despite his KU contributions, Dolph frequently criticizes KU administrators in his Saturday column in the Journal-World.
In October, Dolph wrote a column lambasting Provost David Shulenburger’s office as a “bottleneck” for new ideas proposed by KU faculty. Quoting anonymous sources, he lamented what he called a negative attitude toward change by Shulenburger.
“That wasn’t initiated by me necessarily, it was a number of faculty people who talked to me,” Dolph said. “Things were slow getting done, slow getting executed, and the nickname for the provost’s office was ‘the no office.’”
The University is an excellent state-aided University, but it has failed to tell its story in the legislature and throughout the state, Dolph said.
Shulenburger declined to comment on the column. However, he said Dolph held strong views on the University and his newspaper was a platform from which he could express those views.
The paper’s politics
Critics say the Journal-World’s coverage of the business community is soft and seldom negative. It also provides little coverage of peace and environmental groups, they say.
Tim Miller, religious studies professor at the University and columnist for The Lawrencian, a local alternative monthly paper, is a self-described Dolph critic. Miller has two main problems with Dolph: He owns the only paper in town and he didn’t earn his position, he says.
Dolph acknowledges he got a head start from his grandfather and father. His father, however, told him there was no guarantee that he would get the job. If he had been a misfit, he wouldn’t have been able to fill the leadership position, he said.
The Journal-World refuses to cover businesses in a negative light, Miller said. It supports what’s good for businesses and provides little coverage of labor, he said.
Dolph said he wished more business writers worked at the Journal-World. Journalists lack training in business writing, he complained.
“I’ve talked to people in the journalism school and the business school. I wish that KU had some courses between journalism and business,” he said.
Kendrick Blackwood, the former Journal-World reporter, said that to his knowledge, Dolph never required reporters to slant articles in a pro-business manner. Blackwood recalled that he wrote some “semi hard-hitting” articles about Doug Compton, who owns First Management Inc. and may be the largest real estate developer in Lawrence. Compton advertises in both the Journal-World and the Kansan.
Amber Fraley, editor of The Lawrencian, says the Journal-World tends to avoid stories important to local liberals. Journal-World and Channel 6 news staffers may avoid the stories because they don’t know how interested people are in them, but the lack of coverage also has to do with a mindset that begins with Dolph, she says.
“I get the impression that he’s pro-business and politically conservative,” Fraley said. “He operates his paper with the assumption that everyone in Lawrence thinks that way, too.”
Even so, she says, the paper has become more liberal in the past 20 years, perhaps for business rather than political reasons.
“It took a long time for Dolph and the company to realize the liberals are not just drugged-up hippies with no jobs,” Fraley said. “The liberals in this town have good-paying jobs. They spend money in the community and they want a voice as to what happens in the community. For financial reasons, they can’t continue to shut out these people.”
Carey Maynard-Moody, vice chairwoman of the Lawrence chapter of the Kansas Sierra Club and resident of Lawrence for 25 years, says Dolph’s news operations provide scant environmental coverage. The business community is wary of the potential restriction of development that environmental concerns pose, she said.
“We all have our passions and business is his passion,” she said of Dolph.
Dolph describes himself as a “moderate, and more conservative than liberal,” but he does not support any candidates financially, he said. In state elections and in national elections, Dolph says he votes most often for Republicans.
“Historically in Kansas, the Republican party has been the majority party and has been able to field the strongest type of candidates,” he said. “There have been Democrats though, such as Bob Docking, who we supported editorially and personally.”
The Journal-World runs opinion columns from socially conservative syndicated columnists Cal Thomas and James Dobson, founder of Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, but also carries such liberals as Leonard Pitts and Ellen Goodman.
A newspaper should run conservative columnists even if the publisher or owner is a “staunch, liberal Democrat,” Dolph said.
Like his father, Dolph has long been involved as a member and officer of the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce, the city’s most important advocate for business interests, and the Journal-World editorials have generally supported proposed developments or business expansion in the city.
Melinda Henderson, coordinator for Progressive Lawrence Campaign, an organization that she says believes in sensible growth, complained that Dolph writes that people in her organization don’t want the city to grow at all.
“That’s my biggest complaint — that he says there’s a small group of no-growths,” Henderson said. “A lot of his columns make total sense, but then he’ll try to paint the picture that people want to stop growth.”
Ann Gardner, editor of the Journal-World’s opinion page, is one of the chamber’s past presidents. Because the newspaper has editorialized about business and growth issues, that raises questions as to a conflict of interest. While the Journal-World doesn’t share its code of ethics with readers, The Kansas City Star’s code of ethics states, “editorial employees should not belong to organizations about which they must write or make editorial judgments.”
Gardner explains, “I’m not unilaterally forming editorial opinion for the Journal-World. I’d have to lead a pretty sequestered life to not write anything, and to not be involved in a community this size.”
Dolph said he told Gardner she should make clear to the chamber that just because she served did not mean that she would support its position.
“It’s something that needs to be discussed,” he said. But the chamber and businesses are not “going to get a blank check from the Journal-World,” he said.
“You can’t ever be in the hip pocket of a city manager, or a mayor, or a chamber of commerce, or a football coach, or an athletic director or a chancellor,” Dolph said. “You need to be supportive and helpful, but you just can’t be in their hip pockets. That’s just not our business.”
Local politicians of both parties describe Dolph as involved in the community.
Mark Buhler, vice president and sales manager at Stephens Real Estate, says he used to speak with Dolph regularly when Buhler was a Republican in the Kansas Senate and a member of the board of the Chamber of Commerce. He and Dolph talked about growth, planning and real estate, he said.
“He’s a much easier person to talk to than people think he is,” Buhler said.
Paul Davis, an attorney and Democrat in the Kansas House of Representatives, says he talks with Dolph periodically about legislative, community and KU issues.
“He has his political opinions, as we all do,” Davis said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat — he’s always willing to talk.”
The future
The odds for keeping any successful business in the family decrease with each generation, Dolph said, acknowledging that the number of independent media companies is shrinking, too. Tax laws, the increasing complexity of the information business and the future of newspapers are among his chief concerns.
Though his two sons hold leadership positions in the company, he’s given permission to both his sons and his two daughters to sell the company. But he says he’s confident Dan and Dolph III can carry on The World Company.
Until then, despite what critics say, Dolph will continue to lead his dominant World Company the way he always has — supporting growth for both his business and his community, yet wary of potential competitors.
Mallot and Haworth Halls, two of the larger ...
1 comment
Lawrence Settles Lawrence graduate student “I like T-Pain ...
1 comment
Mallot and Haworth Halls, already two of the ...
1 comment
It was the symmetry of this sidewalk that ...
1 comment
Texting while driving is the cause of many ...
1 comment
Comments
Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.