Jerry Nachman is proof that, in adversity, the son-in-law also rises.
A rancorous, nearly 2-month-old strike continues against the Tribune Co.- owned New York Daily News, the nation`s third-largest metropolitan daily, with no sign of a fruitful resolution to the dispute. Paid circulation has plunged from 1.1 million to a claimed 600,000, and the paper faces huge distribution obstacles and surprisingly broad public resentment as symbolized by a Monday union rally that united at the podium a far-from-chummy trio: Gov. Mario Cuomo, Cardinal John O`Connor and Jesse Jackson.
But, if there`s a clear winner so far, it`s the New York Post-a tabloid on death`s door just three months ago. Since the strike at the News started Oct. 25, the Post has seen its circulation rise by 250,000, it says, to 700,000, far outpacing the 125,000 gain cited by New York Newsday.
Many advertisers have at least temporarily fled the Daily News in favor of the Post. One recent day, Post editors ditched the stock tables, a regular column by former Mayor Ed Koch and a page devoted to TV stories-to run more ads. It`s been 128 pages (its maximum) some days, with the Daily News recently ranging in size from 70 to 90.
All of which creates a situation that is beyond ironic.
Nachman, you see, is not just editor of the Post. He`s also son-in-law of Stanton R. Cook-former publisher of the Chicago Tribune and former chief executive officer and current chairman of Tribune Co.-as a result of marriage to Nancy, one of Cook`s five children.
”I can`t believe that nobody has pointed that out yet,” Nachman declares in his Post office, where the clutter (including a baseball bat on his desk) does not exude a Fortune 500 air.
”Am I ambivalent about all this (the strike)?” Nachman asks. ”Yes. Things are uncomfortable at home. Nancy is in a very awkward position. . . . She`s a Tribune kid. This is very painful.”
That Nachman married into the North Shore family has always turned heads, as he readily acknowledges.
Cook is a mild-mannered, self-effacing, impeccably tailored pillar of the Chicago business community. He is white-haired and comports himself with an almost patrician manner. He is the son of Christian Scientists and his daughter Nancy, 6 feet in height, is strikingly good looking.
Nachman, 44, is an opinionated, somewhat unkempt, balding, very short and overweight journalist-manager raised in a Jewish home in Brooklyn.
Encountered at work, he was attired in faded gray chinos, sport shirt, well-worn brown sweater and Top-siders that look as if they have more miles on them than most used station wagons. Danny DeVito would play him in the movie. Nachman was reared in Brooklyn, and then Pittsburgh, though his parents ultimately returned to the New York City borough.
He entered Youngstown State University in Ohio, but in his sophomore year went to work in a steel mill. Laid off, he stumbled into journalism via a state employment program that routed him to the Hubbard News, a 4,000 circulation weekly in Ohio, as a $1.60-an-hour reporter.
He never finished college, instead finding jobs at weeklies and small dailies before winding up at the copy desk of the Pittsburgh Press. At the suggestion of some colleagues, he decided, somewhat whimsically, to try Australia. But, first, he returned to Brooklyn for a brief stay with his parents.
There, he ate lots of his mother`s tuna sandwiches off a TV snack table while watching ”Jeopardy!” He may look like the pudgy misfit who always got stuck in right field, but he`s closer to the bespectacled fellow whom you always wanted to sit next to during math tests.
Nachman was, he says, a ”Jeopardy!” whiz (”I won $10 million at home,” he deadpans). His mother urged him to become a real contestant.
He followed the advice, got on the show, earned $900 during his first appearance, returning several times and leaving with about $4,000. His success, he recalls, prompted him to abandon plans to move to Australia. ”It was all an omen,” he says of the circumstances that kept him in New York.
He became a news writer, then a reporter, at the CBS station in New York, WCBS, just as it went all-news. From there, his resume delineates a serpentine path with as many stops as some Amtrak trains. It reads like this:
Correspondent, WCBS-TV in New York; news director, KCBS radio in San Francisco; executive producer, WCBS-TV; vice president-general manager, WRC radio in Washington; vice president-news, all of NBC`s owned-and-operated TV stations; news director, WNBC-TV in New York; vice president-general manager of NBC`s WRC-TV in Washington; columnist, New York Post; editor, New York Post.
It was during his San Francisco tenure that he met Nancy Cook, then an Associated Press executive and now a Multimedia sales manager (pushing the
”Donahue” and the Sally Jessy Raphael talk shows to TV stations on the East Coast and thus competing against Tribune Entertainment`s ”Geraldo” and Joan Rivers programs).
They were married in 1983, but not before Nachman, child of Brooklyn, arrived in Kenilworth for the first time and stated his intentions. He recalls feeling ”every Woody Allen, atavistic, class-conscious wobble” upon his arrival.
The Cooks had a Doberman pinscher named Eich. It was an abbreviation for a German town in which Nancy had spent time but, at first, Nachman says, he
”thought it was named after (Nazi war criminal) Adolf Eichmann.”
Nachman refers, and respectfully so, to Cook as ”the Minimal Man.” By that he means that his father-in-law is modest to a fault, short on flourishes and an adherent to simple virtues in leading his life.
M.S. ”Bud” Rukeyser Jr., former head of corporate communications at NBC, likens Jerry and Nancy to Trylon and Perisphere, symbols of the 1939 New York`s World Fair. Trylon was enormous, tall and alluring; Perisphere was a round ball at the base of Trylon.
But it must have been a smart base because, as Rukeyser recalls, Nachman
”was brilliant and very creative. He could run a newsroom better than anyone we (NBC) ever saw. He was a terrific motivator.”
When he left WRC-TV in 1988, it was voluntarily. A local columnist, Nachman remembers, wrote that he was leaving television to be reunited with his intellect.
He`d always fantasized about writing a newspaper column and sent a letter to Frank Devine, former Chicago Sun-Times editor, then editor of the Post. Devine took a flyer and Nachman became a columnist.
When real estate magnate Peter Kalikow bought the Post from Murdoch, Nachman kept on writing. And when Kalikow and Jane Amsterdam, Devine`s talented successor, parted company, Nachman became editor. He denies plotting against onetime close comrade Amsterdam, though some Post staff members wonder and the two no longer speak.
His tenure at the Post includes several bona fide scoops. Still, the inconsistent, if jaunty, paper has far to go editorially and, say some, Nachman can suffer from a self-promotional bent that rankles subordinates and from inattention to detail.
In the fall, the paper almost went under and was given a reprieve by temporary union concessions that expire in March. The cost-costing
arrangements leave a bare-bones staff of only several dozen full-time reporters who must work a four-day week.
Then came the Daily News mess.
”This is not how we chose to compete,” Nachman says. ”We wanted a fair fight.”
He and Nancy vacationed with her parents in the Caribbean two weeks ago. The strike, he says, was never mentioned. Not once, he adds, have he and his father-in-law discussed the subject.
If the issue were to arise, what would he say? He chooses his words carefully. ”I`d be presumptuous telling people who`ve been so successful how to run those businesses.”
But he does concede that ”we (the Post) were as shocked as everyone else at the series of miscalculations” by the Daily News, including a poor distribution scheme and what may have been a public relations gaffe in using the homeless to hawk papers on the streets of the city.
”The homeless are so repulsive to New Yorkers,” Nachman says, ”that in many minds, the Daily News has replaced the empty, stretched-out hand as an object of aversion.”
Ultimately, he knows, the strike is bad for the entire newspaper business. ”Our fear is that hundreds of thousands of (Daily News) readers”
will never return to any paper.
And if the News does survive and, later, prosper, the Post might well be in ample trouble, though its editor demurs.
”This paper is like the Viet Cong,” Nachman concludes. ”You think you`ve killed them, then they pop up out of nowhere with AK-47s and spray you. Some supernatural force keeps it going.”
– – –
In this age of limousine journalists, who become dyspeptic at the thought of flying coach class, the morning scene was mildly refreshing.
There, at 8:30 a.m. last week, was a man jammed inconspicuously on a Manhattan crosstown bus ($1.15), presumably heading to work, standing and scanning his copy of the Financial Times of London.
One mulled going over, perhaps for a brief hello, but decided not to. It seemed a fleeting moment of solitude for Peter Jennings that did not warrant interruption.
