The New News Boss

Michael Fitzgerald

Bob Starzel became head of the Anschutz San Francisco Newspaper Company when press-shy, conservative, religious billionaire Phil Anschutz reportedly paid $20 million for the San Francisco Examiner in February. A longtime Anschutz employee and a San Francisco resident since 1988, 63-year-old Starzel officially retired from the Union Pacific Railroad in 2000. Though trained as an attorney, he claims newspapers are in his genes: His grandfather started and ran several of them, while his father was a legendary head of the Associated Press. Starzel even married a reporter. Michael Fitzgerald talks to the new head of the paper that won't go away.

How do you react to comments that you should shut down the Examiner, or [newspaper magnate] William Dean Singleton's wondering aloud if buying the paper was "a senile moment" for Anschutz? Wait and see. This paper is going to demonstrate journalistic excellence, and it's going to fill a need in the marketplace. Singleton's comment was untoward and juvenile.

What do you mean by "journalistic excellence"? I'd love for someone to say after a couple of years, "Wow, the Economist must own the Examiner, the way they write." We'll be a quick read, but that's the quality we'd like to have.

Anschutz is very conservative. Will he create a Fox News for San Francisco? Not on my watch. A high-quality product can't be ideological or political. This city can't follow a normal political model. If anything, we should be getting rid of false assumptions. Like that downtown is out to hurt the neighborhoods. Take Prop. J, for example. The vote against it was incredible, 70 to 30. That's a sign that people haven't had a debate.

Let's do some free association: Kings or Sharks? Kings, I'm afraid, just because of who owns this paper. [Anschutz owns the L.A. Kings.]

Joint operating agreement? A historical anomaly that's better off dead.

Yellow. Yellow journalism? You mean muckraking. The antithesis of what we want to be. We want to be entertaining and intelligent.

If you look at other big-city tabloids, they really struggle financially. How will you be different? We're looking at a heavy display of local news. Large newspapers don't seem to like local news. Local stories don't end with one quick look.

Tell me four things we won't be saying about the Ex in a year. You won't say it's dull, politically oriented, or irrelevant. Or that it's all over the map.

Will people still be baffled as to why Anschutz bought the Examiner? Let 'em be baffled.