One of the news barons passed last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/business/richard-b-scudder-co-founder-of-medianews-group-dies-at-99.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120716Richard B. Scudder, Co-Founder of MediaNews Group, Dies at 99
By DENNIS HEVESI
Richard B. Scudder, a founder and former chairman of MediaNews Group, one of the nation’s largest newspaper chains, and an innovator in recycling newsprint, died on Wednesday at his home in Navesink, N.J. He was 99.
His daughter Jean Scudder confirmed his death.
A grandson of the founder of The Newark Evening News with roots in New Jersey going back to Colonial days, Mr. Scudder was chairman of MediaNews from 1985 through 2009. He and a longtime friend William Dean Singleton, who is now chairman, became business partners in 1983 when they acquired The Gloucester County Times, a daily in Woodbury, N.J., with a circulation of about 26,000. Soon after, largely with Mr. Scudder’s financial backing, they bought four small newspapers in Ohio and four in California.
Today, MediaNews, a privately owned company, owns major papers like The Denver Post, The Detroit News, The Oakland Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News and The El Paso Times. Over all, MediaNews has 57 daily newspapers in 11 states with a combined circulation of 2.3 million, making it the nation’s second-largest newspaper company after the Gannett Company. MediaNews also owns 122 nondaily newspapers in nine states.
“Dick spent most of his time on the news side, but was also a very savvy businessman,” Mr. Singleton said. “He was involved in all the acquisitions and personally made many of them with people that he knew well.”
Mr. Scudder came to know many people in the newspaper business during his tenure as publisher of The Newark Evening News, a post he held from 1952 until the paper closed in 1972. The News was founded by his grandfather Wallace M. Scudder in 1883.
For decades it was considered the newspaper of record in New Jersey. “The editorial policy of The News is irreverence for everybody,” Richard Scudder once said.
His interest in recycling began in the late 1950s when a news distributor approached him saying he had developed a process for de-inking newsprint. Working with Robert Illingworth, an engineer at The News, Mr. Scudder tested the process in a sink at his office and in a blender at his home. The research was later moved to a laboratory at Syracuse University. There had been previous attempts to de-ink paper, but none that worked as well with the more fragile newsprint.
“This was huge,” said Kathleen Lhost, executive director of the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wis. “It was the right combination of chemicals to remove the ink without destroying or damaging the fibers.”
In 1961, Mr. Scudder built the Garden State Paper Company in Garfield, N.J., which, with three other mills he later opened, eventually produced more than two million tons of recycled newsprint a year — turning bales of old newspapers into 15,000-pound rolls.
“Up until then the industry didn’t believe there was a commercially viable way to remove ink from newspaper and recycle the paper,” Ms. Lhost said. “Now, throughout the industry, more than 50 percent of the amount of fiber content that goes into making a newspaper page has been recycled.”
Mr. Scudder was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1995.
Richard Betts Scudder was born in Newark on May 13, 1913, to Edward and Katherine Scudder. He graduated from Princeton in 1935 and then worked as a reporter for The Boston Herald. Serving in the Army in Europe during World War II, he was assigned to Operation Annie (short for anonymous), an underground German-language radio station with the mission of broadcasting misinformation to the Nazis.
Mr. Scudder married Elizabeth Shibley in 1944; she died in 2004. Besides his daughter Jean, he is survived by two other daughters, Carolyn Miller and Elizabeth Difani; a son, Charles; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Upon coming home after the war, Mr. Scudder became a reporter for The Newark Evening News.
During an interview with The New York Times in 1968, he proudly indicated an engraving on the wall outside his office, depicting the signing of the Articles of Confederation of the United States in 1777. Nathaniel Scudder, a colonel in Washington’s army, was one of two New Jersey signers.
“And there,” Mr. Scudder said, pointing to a framed document, “is a commission in the French-Indian Wars for my ancestor Richard Betts Scudder, the man I’m named for.”
