Newspaper business grows, changes with communityANNE BRADY
|
 Jewish News publisher Flo Eckstein and her husband Paul, purchased the paper from her mother, Pearl Newmark and her late father Cecil Newmark. |
There was a different metal plate for each of the roughly 300 subscribers. The metal plates "would stack like cards in the Addressograph machine," he recalls. Then Abrams, by hand, would individually slide each copy of the paper into place, for an address to be stamped on it.
A couple of years later, when Abrams was old enough to legally operate a motor vehicle, he would drive twice a month to the bus station in downtown Phoenix, to meet the bus from Coolidge transporting the two or three boxes of freshly printed newspapers to be addressed and mailed to Jewish residents of the Valley of the Sun.
"There was very strong support for the paper. It was the major form of communication in the community, the major way to get (Jewish) world news," Abrams says.
Fifty years after Goldman and original co-publisher Joe Stocker took over a fledgling monthly publication of the Phoenix Jewish Community Council (predecessor of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix) and created an independent Jewish community newspaper in the Valley, run out of Goldman's garage, Jewish News of Greater Phoenix has grown to a weekly newspaper with some 20,000 readers and a staff of 20 people.
Despite all the growth and changes over five decades, the paper's current editor and publisher, Flo Eckstein, says the newspaper's mission and many of the subjects it covers have remained the same. The paper remains committed to informing the Valley's Jewish community about local events, as well as being a reliable source of Jewish news from around the world.
"Incredibly, though the nuances may change, the basic subject matter is the same," says Eckstein, who recently spent many hours herself pouring over the earliest editions of the paper, while preparing this 50th anniversary edition. "More than anything else, new technology has enhanced our ability to make changes, to give readers information about late-breaking news up to the minute we go out the door to the printer."
The early years
Back in 1948, when the first issues of the Jewish News were published, technology was pretty limited. Stories were written on typewriters, then shipped to the Coolidge Examiner, where the paper was set in hot type and later printed.
"He (Goldman) would get a mock-up back from Coolidge, and he'd make corrections
Joe Stocker recalls that he had just gotten married in 1948 and was working as the editorial page editor for the Arizona Times, a daily newspaper published by Anna Boettiger, daughter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After Anna Boettiger's husband, John, left her, Stocker says, the Arizona Times fell on hard times. Meanwhile, Bud Goldman "needed a Jewish newspaper man" to help him with his dream of owning and operating the Phoenix Jewish News. Goldman, in addition to not having a journalism background, was limited physically by severe arthritis. He used a wheelchair much of the time.
"He had a trust set up by his parents that was his main source of income," recalls Abrams. "He did not want to let his arthritis limit him. He had an involvement with the Jewish community, and he saw this as an opportunity to do something out of his home."
Stocker recalls that he "went out to California with my wife, Ida, and looked at the Jewish papers there, and I thought we could do it." He agreed to be co-publisher with Goldman, but soon "found out I wasn't just editing; I had to sell advertising, and I didn't want to spend my life doing that." So Goldman bought out Stocker, then hired him as editor of the newspaper.
Abrams also remembers marketing High Holidays greeting ads over the telephone and making a 50-cent commission per advertisement. So how much did the ads cost? "Probably a dollar," he admits with a chuckle.
Stocker stayed on as editor until Goldman sold the paper in 1961 to Cecil and Pearl Newmark.
'You have to love it'
To make it as a small-business owner, you have to love the business you're in, says Pearl Newmark, who together with her late husband, Cecil, owned and operated the Jewish News for 20 years.
"I always liked languages, and my husband was the businessman," she remembers. "I just loved to edit copy and read proof. ... We worked so hard, but there was such satisfaction.
"There were weeks we ate a lot of McDonald's. We really had a hard time. But you can't be impatient (when you take on a small business). It takes time to build up the business."
Back in 1961, Cecil and Pearl Newmark owned a small magazine subscription service. A few years earlier Cecil had been out of work when his employer of 29 years, the American News Company (a national magazine distributor), had been sold. And Pearl Newmark, a mother of three, had gone back to work full-time as a legal secretary. Goldman, a friend of Cecil Newmark, had been looking to sell the Jewish News for a couple of years, and convinced the Newmarks to buy it.
The first big change the Newmarks made? "We had an office," Pearl Newmark says with a smile.
For a short time, Pearl Newmark continued working as a legal secretary, while her husband ran the newspaper; after all, they had a family of five to support. But after only a few months, the Newmarks sold the subscription agency and Pearl Newmark quit her job as a secretary and joined her husband at the paper as editor.
"Times have changed since I entered the business world. Then, most wives and mothers were homebodies. But I didn't fit into the mold," Pearl Newmark would later tell a crowd that gathered in the 1980s when she received an award from the Anti-Defamation League.
"Work at the Phoenix Jewish News was demanding, exciting, challenging, frustrating, but never dull. Despite the hectic pace, there is no place I would rather have been between 1961 and 1981."
The Newmarks hired a variety of journalists, mostly as freelancers, over the years to write articles and design pages. Gradually, they learned from their employees about their business. The paper grew from eight pages every two weeks, to 24- and 28-page issues.
Then in 1976, the Newmarks hired a young woman named Leni Reiss as a writer. Reiss had a degree in English with a minor in journalism and had taught English.
"My fantasy job was always in journalism. When Pearl and Cecil hired me, it truly was a fantasy become a reality," says Reiss, who worked her way up to a job as managing editor of the newspaper, a position she held full-time until 1994. Over those 18 years, she traveled to many places and interviewed many interesting people.
"I learned by doing, and I did everything. Pearl was absolutely a dream to work for. I learned to do the dummy (page layouts) from Cecil. I just devoured other papers," Reiss recalls. "It was exciting. I loved giving birth every week to a paper. But being an integral part of the community was what I really loved.
"Some of my closest friends I met through Jewish journalism. I loved being smack in the center of everything that was going on."
Like mother, like daughter
In 1981, the Newmarks sold the newspaper to their daughter Flo Eckstein and her husband, Paul, a managing partner at the law firm Brown & Bain.
Flo Eckstein had spent 14 years at Jewish Family and Children's Service, doing secretarial and social work, but like her mother, she says she "always loved working with words." Paul Eckstein, meanwhile, had been editor of his high school paper, worked for a summer on the sports desk at Phoenix Newspapers and done a great deal of legal work for media clients.
When Flo Eckstein learned that her parents were investigating selling the newspaper, she says she got a job as a writer at the Jewish News to get a feel for the business. A few months later, she came clean about her intentions. "Two or three people wanted to buy it. Flo seemed like a natural," says Pearl Newmark.
"I asked Flo to keep 'Newmark' in her name (in the staff box)
In 1984, Pearl Newmark shifted gears and became executive director of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society, a position from which she only recently retired.
That same year, 1984, is when Flo Eckstein realized her goal of making the Jewish News a weekly publication. Later in the 1980s, the newspaper made the big switch from typewriters to computers, for word processing and pagination (page design, and the placement of stories and photos on the pages), and for ad scheduling and accounting.
Reiss says the switch to computer technology was a big adjustment for her, and she's still amazed every time she goes online to send an e-mail message. As senior contributing editor, she now e-mails frequent stories to the paper on a freelance basis.
"I miss being smack in the middle of it," she says, "although I wonder sometimes how I did it. I had a pretty full workload. It's just a miracle I did it."
In 1988, the newspaper added to its publishing schedule an annual community directory.
Another more recent addition is Jewish News' World Wide Web edition
Flo Eckstein says she hopes to soon sell and post advertising on the Web page. And she would like to "go beyond the weekly newspaper" and have the Web page updated on a daily basis as important news occurs and changes.
She notes with pride that the newspaper has made an effort to make its print and Web editions accessible and easily understood by a broader range of people, including unaffiliated readers, non-Jewish spouses of Jews and non-Jews, and she says she wants to continue efforts in that regard.
She says she has never regretted buying the newspaper. "It's a very exciting business," she says. "Each day, the news is new, and the opportunities are new."
For his part, early Jewish News editor Joe Stocker says he continues to read the paper every week, and he has high praise for Eckstein. "I was just doing whatever I could to make a buck," he says. "Flo has really put it (the paper) on the map."
