Orphans united: Beaupre, Virgin Islands daily

The small Pennsylvania newspaper chain that hired Chiquita Brands scandal casualty Larry Beaupre (left) has bought the Pulitzer Prize-winning Virgin Islands daily Gannett sold a decade ago to a phone-sex mogul.

Times-Shamrock Communications of Scranton, Pa., bought The Virgin Islands Daily News a week ago, for $5.25 million from its now-bankrupt owner. Family-owned Times-Shamrock owns seven other dailies, mostly in Pennsylvania. Beaupre has been a top editor of the flagship Times-Tribune since late 2000.

For Corporate news junkies, the Times-Shamrock deal combines two of the more unpleasant chapters in Gannett's recent history, events that both took place the same year: 1998.

What's the price of silence?
Gannett sold the Virgin Islands paper that year for a reported $17 million to Jeffrey Prosser, a phone-sex entrepreneur who had become one of the Daily News' main targets for criticism. The sale came just three years after the small paper (its circulation was under 17,000) won the Pulitzer for public service, honoring Melvin Claxton's courageous reporting on island crime and corruption. Prosser's multimillion-dollar offer would allow him to muzzle a critic. Gannett knew that when it handed over the paper -- and the Pulitzer.

"That's what shocked people," Claxton told Columbia Journalism Review at the time. "We became a target for a buyout because we did what we were supposed to do."

Ten years later, Prosser's former company is now broke, Billy Shields writes at Poynter Online. Yet, even after a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale last Friday, Shields says, "a newspaper with a storied past and a controversial present is looking at an uncertain future." Shields recalls the shit Gannett deservedly took for selling the paper: "Columbia Journalism Review published a piece entitled Sellout in Paradise, noting that under Gannett the newspaper was extremely critical of Prosser. It followed up the story reporting that the paper's editorial pages had been gutted as a result of Prosser's ownership."

Beaupre, bananas, and 'B.S.'
The Chiquita project was a debacle. Beaupre was the Enquirer's top editor, and the series attacking one of Cincinnati's most powerful companies was his baby. But the paper soon learned that reporter Mike Gallagher had broken into Chiquita's voice-mail system to get key information. The Enquirer repudiated the series in a shocking front-page apology, and paid at least $14 million to avoid a Chiquita lawsuit. Gallagher was fired.

Gannett next targeted Beaupre, forcing him from the company. He sued, claiming he'd been scapegoated, and later settled for $550,000. (Illustrating once more why Corporate has no credibility, the run-up to Beaupre's ouster featured this piece of propaganda, by News Department chief Phil Currie.)

Beaupre wouldn't talk about Chiquita when Cincinnati magazine interviewed him for a recent story about the Enquirer. He talked about the industry, however, saying publishers too often lurch from one fad to the next.

"There’s a lot of marketing mumbo-jumbo; some of it contains kernels of truth and some of it is B.S. If there are a number of people interested in pets and there are enough to make it worth your while to report on it, then that’s OK,'' he says. "It isn’t so much that these things are wrong to do, but if they’re being done at the expense of a story about a tax increase or how many people were killed in Iraq, then you have to reevaluate your priorities."

Your thoughts, in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, use this link from a non-work computer; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.

[Beaupre photo: Northeast PA media news and gossip blog]