The Press: New Reign in Maine

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Not grand but tidy was the Maine publishing empire Guy P. Gannett built. They were Guy's five papers,* no mistake; his flinty Republicanism, his bedrock conviction that heavy advertisers deserved to make news, were graven into every issue. Five years ago, when Gannett died and the chain passed to his daughter, a handsome divorcee of 30 and mother of three boys, most old subscribers reckoned that the reign in Maine would never be the same again.

Jean Gannett Williams' legacy was loaded with liabilities—but not of the financial sort. Her credentials were meager: one year's apprenticeship, one press junket through Europe. Buffed to a high private-school gloss at Masters School and Bradford Junior College, she seemed miscast in a man's world of deadlines and hot lead. Jean became president, but Gannett papers were really managed by two survivors of her father's rule: General Manager Laurence H. Stubbs and Publisher Roger Chilton Williams, son of the late novelist Ben Ames Williams—and Jean Gannett Williams' ex-husband. Tongues naturally clacked about that.

Jean let them clack. She needed Roger Williams' publishing savvy while she gathered some of her own. And she shared his liberal journalistic approach. Old Guy would have been shocked at some of the changes gradually wrought in his empire. Not long after his death, the Gannett papers endorsed a Democrat—Edmund S. Muskie, running for Governor. Editing tightened: no longer was it considered news when a Portland merchant laid fresh bricks over the old store front. The papers' rock-bound horizons expanded; one Portland staffer went to India on a fellowship, another to France.

Such radical departures were regarded with jaundiced disapproval by General Manager Stubbs, a Guy Gannett conservative. The breach between Stubbs and Roger Williams widened into an open feud. "Stubbs didn't care a hoot about improving the paper,'' said Jean Gannett Williams, who did. Last fall, worn out by refereeing the quarrel, Jean collapsed, was hospitalized with pneumonia. A long convalescence gave her ample time to think.

Last week, with the assurance of five years' experience—the last two the most profitable in history—Jean took charge. Out went Publisher Williams and General Manager Stubbs. In as publisher and undisputed baroness of the Gannett chain: Jean Gannett Williams. 35. They are Jean's five papers now.