Good morning. Thank you for joining us. I have the honor of introducing this mornings very special program in conversation with Chris Matthews and former ceo and executive vice chairman of the corporation. Each night millions of viewers turn ttuned to msnbc at 7 00 tor chris deliver his trademark openings to hardball that the roots of the journalism career are actually with hearst. For over 15 years, i thought it was 12 but he corrected me like a journalist. Crisp is a washington, d. C. Bureau chief of the examiner and was a syndicated columnist for the San Francisco chronicle after frank thought the San Francisco chronicle and then he went on to not only launched hardball that successfully over eight bestselling books. As everyone knows, he returned this week after the hiatus to recover from Prostate Cancer surgery and we couldnt be more grateful to you being here today. Thank you. I had the pleasure of working with Frank Bennett the past 26 years. What is remarkable is that represents less than half of his tenure with hearst. As we have been blessed to have his influence in the company for the better part of six decades with nearly 30 years as the ceo. Under his leadership, the company has expanded exponentially including historic partnerships that launched amd, the history channel, lifetime, and of course our partnership in espn. Our Television Group expanded from three to 33 television stations and or newspaper and magazine groups have built upon their great legacies and best in class brands. With my colleagues and a lot of you here today and i are most proud of is franks moral compass in this focus on the importance of Community Service and the role our business is play to better the lives of our neighbors. The book reads on the table the importance of corporate leadership in the communities we serve. I think that he captures the culture of the company with the following passage in the books prologue and i will summarize i believe there was one north star. It is and what you know and how hard you work. Its not who you know but how other people know you. And i want to take a piece of the show and say authors, icons and more stars, lets play hardball. [laughter] thank you. [applause] that beats any Memorial Service i ever attend it. [laughter] one thing is you get to find out who your friends are. I want to ask about first of all the hero of mine sitting to my right i want you to clarify this. The idea that i had about you was when i came out on this plane before they deregulated, the plane was empty, citizen kane was playing. The thing about it was they built this big entire and then the lights began to come on. Everybody remembers the picture of the lights going out and it was the ending of the empire. Then i heard about you and how in the family needed someone like you to come in from outside, somebody to rebuild and make it it stateoftheart and save it, you did that. And in the book, you actually point that out. [laughter] you hear one of the kids saying where do you get your money and she says from mr. Bennett. Because everybody wants to learn from you, how did you see a way for ththrough the changes that t print was going to be challenged and there was going to be new media and you better jump before the ones that espn. Everybodys finding out what the headline should be in the Houston Chronicle today. Thats where i was yesterday as a matter of fact. [laughter] in the headline two more to go, three more to go. David c. Have you bought anything today . I was buying things right and left. I think the short answer is Companies Like all institutions come to different points of their lives. I happened to come on board at a very appropriate time as the generation of leadership was retiring because of age many of them have worked with him. In fact it wasnt in the book thabut i always like to talk abt the leadership of the complex advertising [laughter] theres got to be one like that at every meeting. [laughter] why did you pick that . [laughter] i just like it. Anyway, one of the things that helped our company gets through the Great Depression was that they were behind in the classified advertising in every market because any of them were active in the newspapers and the world was moving to the papers as Everybody Knows it today and a long came the paper rationing which meant that all of a sudden we were getting as much paper as the other guys and they had to cut back on the classifieds in order to take care of the rest of the paper does and they were able to pick up some of the classified advertisement and it kind of lifted. I started as a classified ad salesman but to go back to the original question, a group of us came into the authority if you will all at once and we had a huge opportunity that created two things that were important. One was the will whic well whicd about in the book where he appointed 13 people to the trustees of his company and only five of whom could be members of the family so in effect he made the decision to have the Company Survive and live far into the future and each one of those professionals that must be someone not a Family Member. Why is that important . Because we were ready to take advantage of bringing in the best management and talent that we could and we didnt have a Family Member saying i want that job. The authorities simply resided in the trustees. And the second thing was the Tax Reform Act of 1968 required any foundation that held more than 2 of the voting stock or 20 of the nonvoting stock to divest of the stock. It was held by the charitable organization. What did that mean . Event of the two foundations gave them 136 million that was the last obligation we have to find them and we are able now to pay very nice dividends to the families. Both of those things worked beautifullworkbeautifully becauy support would have been there but it was really there because thebecausedavid c. Weaver makins but the dividends were improving and as i say, bill loved every move we made and every new hire that we made, like jim miller was one of the bestknown editors. They loved it and they gave us all the support and the world. Our culture is the answer to it and we are a company that cares about the employees. We work with each other and we have the single objective to have the best company we can have in every one of our categories. When people have difficulty performing in their jobs we try to help them do that. We dont always assume that you change the amount. My own experience on that is that you have a 75 chance of success from within promotion and about 50 50 in recruiting. You need those because obviously if you already only put people up in the company from within, then you miss a lot of knowledge and experience. On the other hand, the companies that rely almost exclusively on the recruiting and there was a learning curve and was very it y difficult to keep pace with that. So those are all the principles i just learned. I have no idea what i was doing. Those of you that read the book no to grade education that my father gave me. He was an artist and songwriter and showman and had it not been for the depression and his taking of Civil Service jobs, his career would have looked more like mine. So as i say from about 12 on, he treated me as an adult and watched everything i did up until his last day he would say are you doing okay. He never would have accepted that i was in charge. [laughter] it just couldnt be. It was our fault. You right in the book about how the family which i know was interesting you said that it works. How does that work because you could so many personalities. It works in large measure because the mandate in baseball for the Management Authority would reside so in a matter of speaking is mandated to work and once they saw that the cooperation and support it was i think not difficult for them to decide this with the test date i wanted. Its working. We are doing fine. When i was ceo, but steve runs the business and i ran the business and so you start there than the other issue in part is that everybody thought that because their name was first, they were automatically rich and were part of a Different Society but that was not so until the Company Started doing while. I have great admiration and i talk about every one of the chairman every one of them had a different approach to life and a great sense of humor. I couldnt say more about them than the family worked and today they are unified with us and management. They have their say that in the end, we have the votes. But we ask that some of the decisions you made. You talked about how you brought the week above 20 . I did the math, one fifth [laughter] tell me the day that you decided there was money in sports. It never would have happened if we hadnt built a relationship. The head of founder and i were on a board together. We were together at a meeting monday and we started talking about this phenomenon changed the business entertainment to being a programming source and that we should do that and that we would lose a lot of money so lets do it together, so we did. We lost money for seven years before the combination of this now lifetime, amd and history. During that time of course we were both hearing from despite the supporting boards, seven years is a long time. We hope you know what youre doing. Ultimately they said we hit the market. On specifics, when espn became an opportunity for us, we decided sports is sure fire and i got a lot of pushback because the main programming theme was tractor pulls at that time. But you just knew. We were losing money but you could tell that it was going to work and that is one of the principles of business. We notice and Television Guys will told you we can see if a program is working even though it is working on the incrementally used a with it and some of the most successful ones thats what happened to them, they did and do great in the early days and we knew this was going to work and then of course when we put espn together with it they gave us a powerful part of our company that is today the largest single section of the company and plays the role today magazines played in funding the expansion that we had initially. So everything is show me the money, cuba gooding although he has his own problems right now. Everybody does. This idea of leave money on the table. You have a woman in the buck that you talk about and say we should have paid you more. You wrote that down. [laughter] i didnt have to write that down. I was thinking about what was that all about. People go weight, people hired agents. This idea of it isnt a complete struggle between employer and employee. Lets talk about that. As the name implies it seems the other guy doesnt have to lose for you to win. If you leave something on the table in the transaction, you will get to play another day. If you dont believe something you will not get to play another day and ive learned with all due respect and ive been waiting for a long time to say this to you the last thing in the world that we believe in is hardball. [laughter] it has different definitions. [laughter] anyway. The idea because when you say if you push too hard you get the last nickel of the deal, what does that mean for the future . The word gets around. Its a relatively small world and all of us know what other people are doing. This transactions you have to hear. I just did a deal with so and so it was almost impossible we couldnt get it done. They didnt live up to their word. In a small environment like that where you are dealing with two dozen people, you better keep your reputation clean and be known as somebody that recognizes the need to have a good outcome. That doesnt mean you dont work hard and try in every way you can to maximize the return that you are going to get. You may have noticed that the Business Roundtable they put out a paper recently which was unbelievably on the mark the concept that everything should go to the shareholder value is simply not the right way to approach business. There are communities, employees, there are a lot of people that have skin in the game and all of them need to be considered whereas the wall and much of business has gone down the road to be required to be sure the shareholder gets the maximum return. That is the author is to life. Other is to life. Lets talk about this. Papers make a return. How do you justify a somewhat lower return or you can make money selling m ms or something, i dont know. How do you do that . First of all as you know, they dont make the money that they need at the peak. The margins are similar to what they were in our better days, but the topline is simply not what it was and the other part of the equation is that the reader has been asked to pay more. The other day at the texas business hall of fame, which i was inducted into a few years ago but i spoke at their breakfast and a woman came up to me afterwards and said i lived n austin and i take the statesman which is the name of the newspaper and she said was sold to the press which was news to us because it wasnt sold to us. We tried to buy it and we didnt succeed. Anyway, her point was that the price she pays now for the paper to be delivered is double what she has historically paid. And its still she didnt say this, im going to say this doesnt cover the cost of distribution and what it costs to put the product together. So, the fleeing of the classified advertising is the biggest single event. It went to the web and it was a big source of income for newspapers. In fact, it was confirmed to me yesterday, there were days during the heyday in houston where there were 115 pages of help wanted classified advertising in the Houston Chronicle. 115 pages. In all of that, not all of that, not all of it, we still have a reasonable business and classifieds, but that was the big change. Shorter answer to your question and that is it is in our dna that we have made it work. They are profitable businesses. Those that we acquire and keep close tabs on have paid for themselves several times over. So, really we look at this as an affect on a lot of it and we paid for it, we got a good return and we are doing something that is good for the community and for the nation. So, presiden this event obama am to tim about if you only broke even with your newspaper, would you continue to publish them and i said well we might not be the right people to ask that to be r because they have a Strong Organization otherwise they wouldnt stay in business. But you wouldnt get the same answer from the independent publisher who needs capital, has to attract money to stay in business. And of course we are down to one to the market except for the few places. But i feel better about it because there are several things that are working that well strengthen and extend the lives as far as i can see. One is we are doing more and more difficult advertising. We are doing than all of our our businesses, but the combination of getting the reader to pay the correct price, today that is 12 to 15 a week if you are a seven day subscriber. Holding on t onto enough advertg and building enough Digital Advertising is the formula for today whereas when i was a local publisher, over 90 advertising. I think about all of the history of the morning paper into the field where i grew up and was the biggest 115 papers. Everybodeverybody thought that s everybody read the paper but then of course the market closed and the paper has to leave. It was more than that. Traffic. The evening news and a change in society because the bluecollar worker marked decline to work early in the morning and came home early in the afternoon at one paper in the driveway when they came home. Now its more like the bosses so theyve moved over and it is a change in society. Its an inability to get a paper that has anything new to the morning paper delivered and then the evening news and of course today that is of course punctuated by what you do in the huge number of offerings on television. I think we are the oped page now. Used to go home and read Dave Kirkpatrick or whatever but today you watch matthau or somebody else, some of the other people out there. There. What i find outcome and this is just an editorial point, im telling you all tv now depends on print. All the news is being done a print. I mean it is lowering the number of tough young reporters in their 30s and 40s that are knocking out stories, breaking all the stories for us. We go to bed and 6 30 at night the papers go to press and keep their storiegettheir stories ou. We are getting the hottest news but we are not paying for it really. Youre not paying for the New York Times is paying for it and other newspapers. How is that going to work economically in the long run . As long as we can make the Business Model that i described continue to work, i think it turns more on the digital side in any of those other ingredients. If we can continue to grow the Digital Advertising and particularly Digital Advertising that has Video Connected with it because they are a lot more attractive if it contains videoo damages if it is just text. Who is going to read about it from pakistan leisure from pakistan cracks and the peripheral vision. And then you raise to it. I usually start with the New York Times after holding them my wife is a Better Newspaper reader than im because she is a little more time to do it. But i will say that in my view the general has made Good Progress even though its the washington post. We get usa today for a number of reasons from the professional point of view and the entertainment stuff they do a good job and also larry kramer. What about the economics of that quex. Its very tough and in the early days a lot of people thought it could never work because it didnt have the benefit of the locals. But thats also the future of television stations if we win in the news we win in the marketplace. And how the networks fall down is important but if you are the leading station in the market with the news then you get the political advertiser which is very important these days because they want people who are well informed and thats the way they are but the story is with all due respect to my broadcasting colleagues but really not compared to what you can learn in a newspaper. It is a tough fight that my confidence level is not only high but rising with the print products because we are breaking the code on digital and we are getting there. Thats number one. Number two we bought into the fact you have to keep that at the highest quality. Whether its magazine cutting the size of the quality of the paper that is a formula for going out of business. It may cut the bucks today but if you have a strong print product with the big and growing Digital Product i think the outlook is not as desire as some people believe. You said you think print will live quex. I do. Absolutely. The tricky part is the 20 yearold. My said knows more than what i know but never picks up a paper. But he reads online. A lot of what he is reading originated in the daily. So the answer to that is the digital side to be a player. And in many of the markets the website is the leading website in the marketplace. And if you can do that with local staff that has the entrepreneurial tendencies and willing to step up for these stories now the numbers of people on paper have declined materially. No question but if you did a survey the majority here prefers the ink on paper version. If im traveling i can get it online if i am home i love the paper. My wife is such a good newspaper reader if she gets to it first when it comes back to me its not folded the way. [laughter] and stuff is torn out so it shows the value of it. [laughter] i work next to an executive who secretary every letter you unfold she irons and then puts it in the file. So leave something on the table i get the sense that honesty is key and take it for granted in you the fact that they trust you and all these grounds and turned over their legacy and you have given them back all. Im grateful. Its been a great run i have no regrets of what i was paid. Its a small group i think we can do this fast lets do a couple questions. Please raise your hand and wait for the microphone. Are you worried about opinion right now . Does that bother you is getting more torrential. Yes. I guess so. I wouldnt isolate that among the biggest worries because most americans have views of their own that has led us to more polarization i worry about that i worry less of opinion of the people that have them in the unpleasantness that is toxic in doing something to side society that the opinions themselves are vital because believe it or not we have a few that are better than her own on a lot of subjects but if you open your ears and listen and not afraid to change your mind youll get value out of that. Was a place for philanthropy for local newspapers a very wealthy guy that i will bankroll that and thats great there is a trend and there are a number of groups partly because some of our baptist journalist lost their positions as they closed and allowed other sources fair amount from commercial they are always looking from the other papers i think there is more opportunity unless that talent those organizations put together but the greater trendline is people who have done exceedingly well in society and a number of those instances i think there will be more. You mentioned the importance of Digital Advertising and thinking about yesterday Mark Zuckerberg testimony its not only is the mindset of leaving something on the table so i just wondering how you view these new entrants that are not traditional media but yet have become great distributors of both traditional content as well as new forms of information. There is a certain amount of alarm as any thinking person does to be devoted to a company that runs on algorithms and companies that take the light to color outside the lines and not be regulated and getting shellacking nothing that will change materially remains to be seen they are so powerful you never would have believed in 60 years in business that our government would have allowed those two or three firms to get to that size with zero interference we cannot even buy a competing newspaper that was losing money so the system has not protected the people in washington knows that but the endgame importantly we find there is a utility on social media but someone said that we could look at that era and the way we look at cigarette smoking which is pretty powerful. Working for the papers friday night 630 your editor says two questions and you say okay but social media has no buddy editing. Who is sad assistant who is that aid . Is this real . You have to go through that and its a wonderful process. But there is no process like that burqa people just say it is crap. I dont know anybody. So your objective the name of the book is leave something on the table available where everyone buys books. [laughter] but one of the messages was the role new local newspapers have played i use several examples and it is indisputable that city and west texas and circulation in the south those businesses that came to that community were influenced by the individual. So that is also a story of America Business from citizen kanes message and we were talking about citizen kane and said i havent seen that but if you believe that i have a bridg bridge. Talking about the synergy have you heard them say the socks saved the globe that obsession with that crazy team not like its catholicism or judaism it is the socks and that data drives people and then they get the latest about the Baseball Team i wonder about these things. Look. Our broadcast people would tell you though weekly rundown of the ten largest highest rated shows on television and on cable and over the course over a year dominated by the nfl games the Academy Awards and ballgames it is incredible consistency but now today hannity is there and Rachel Maddow for the highest rated shows of the week on cable and i think people learn from sports you learn something about teamwork and honesty. And its a lot of fun for me to come home and watch my spurs or the dallas cowboys. Which i love to do. Its a way to let off steam its like a religion. Some of her television colleagues are here today the fact the company got into the Television Business 1948 but in eighties you went bigger with acquisitions like kansas city and boston. If there is a single thought that i had with the Corner Office would be electronic and at that point in time 1979 we had three stations one from each network so i immediately started to scour the country to see where i may buy stations at the time you can only own five vhs into uhf stations but we moved up to those limits and as they changed to acquire the property the biggest of course was the abc affiliate that probably is still the biggest non Network Owned Affiliate station and its not the same as it once was but we absolutely had to go there and we hired alan to come work with us to decide if this was a good move and to spend the money and you can imagine the looks from the print establishment as they started to buy television stations and then when we dared to go into cable they were really ready to lynch me. [laughter] but it all worked and now we are on the same page but that succession kansas city in boston and on and on after that and in a couple of instances some of the stations overlapped on a technical standpoint but i love doing that. To then decide you can buy that television station and then watching them palm beach is one of the Great Stories that we ha had. This is great. Im a great believer. Thank you. You would not believe the pressure. [laughter] cnn they have a carnival line cruise ship down in mexico and thats what they ride with. They dont ever give up that story and now were on to impeachment is just one or two new sources and it is driven i have to tell you they cant get enough they want a fire hydrant in their mouth. [laughter] we actually calm down song with the election with the character that donald trump is in the midst of the election it isnt lost on us but because of the number of people watching this and im guilty. My wife leaves the room because if she stays she hollers at the station spirit but is hard to get in television especially in the big city and then something give it to them and put it on next two hours but now its unlike anything i have ever see seen. So this election will be crazy again. I feared whoever wins we will be even more divided. Perish the thought but i do remember at least one governor or more either he or his wife would not leave the Governors Mansion after losing the election. I hope we are not fighting Something Like that to have a change of government and they will not leave. [laughter] we have a couple of states with the results are not clear. Thank you. [applause] good evening. Im here to introduce our guest. Clive is a former Systems Engineer with ibm. Graduated from university here in portland as a doctor of chiropractic and a trained psychotherapist. Also the awardwinning author of small works of fiction and nonfiction. A recipient of the Richard Wright awarded africanamerican literature as well as numerous other words he is been a guest on