Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche Page B

steam. George had only one question for his dad: “Will the boarders like it?” But there would be no more boarders. They didn’t need the boarders’ money anymore. George just wanted his father to stay. But he curled his hand into the roughness of his father’sbecause he knew that he would go. The house at least was grand. Here was an early lesson for George Wylie: The grander the house, the lonelier it is.
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    The house on Larchmount Crescent was collateral for seven separate mortgages, which Dale used to raise capital for a binge of spending.
    He bought Atkinson’s town paper, The Atkinson Register , for ten thousand cash, with an agreement in monthly promissory notes for fifteen thousand over the course of ten years. That price included the oldest building in town, on the highest hill—he moved the radio station in and forced the six reporters that came with the building to move their desks into the hall. The employees already worked for minuscule salaries and he slashed them further. In the early thirties the possession of a job rated about the same as possession of a soul. At the same time, he raised his rates. With the newspaper and the radio station, he held a town monopoly on advertising.
    As the profit margins crept up, he could leverage higher sums against the properties, with which he could buy more papers, more radio stations. In 1935, he took over The Rainsview Sentinel and KMPS in Bracebridge. In 1936, The Fargo Herald and The Callister Standard . At that time, the purchase value of a newspaper was calculated by taking the annual profit and multiplying it by ten. Working out the annual profits, especially during the years of turbulence, was a problem. The owner always wanted to pick 1927 as the year to establish the business’s profitability because that year combined high commodity prices with a fast-growing global economy. Dale accepted that assumption, which made his opponents believe they’d pulled one over on him, then he would apply the incurred debt obligations of that year over ten years, too.The sellers always believed they were realizing a huge bargain—the 1927 price for a paper in the middle of the thirties—but Dale knew that the optimism of 1927 had incurred its own costs.
    Once he owned a newspaper, Dale cut costs in half. Cut everything. In half. Since the purchase price had been based on ten times the profit margin of a single year, the key was to double that profit margin immediately. “A penny saved is a penny earned” is a mistaken aphorism. A penny saved exponentially improves the ratio of profit to investment. Among his junior executives, Carnegie was famous for never asking the profit, only the cost of things. The work of the owner is not to create or to add value but to make desirable things cheaper. That’s it. That’s the entire trick. Everything else is an accident or a by-product. Dale understood.
    His ideal newsroom, he claimed in a later interview, consisted of three people: One to write the articles, one to sell the ads, and one to make sure the writer and the salesman were spending the least possible amount of money. Dale Wylie converted his cheapness into a spectacle, an object lesson for the employees. It is true—and not merely legend—that at The Atkinson Register every reporter had to hand in a pencil stub before receiving a new pencil. Dale banned notebooks. Reporters used scrap paper for their interviews. At The Fargo Herald , Dale discovered the model that he would apply later to his newspapers across the world: the 20/2 system. He demanded a twenty-percent profit margin and expenses worked out to both decimal points.
    Even at this early stage, Dale didn’t bother his editors about anything other than money. The political positions of his papers were irrelevant. If he bought a paper with a strong left-wing sensibility, it kept that sensibility. He never bothered his editors with calls