Newspaper Chain Research Articles

Barred by Congress: How a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American Elected by the People Were Excluded from Office

Barred by Congress: How a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American Elected by the People Were Excluded from Office

Risk perception in newspaper chains: Threats, uncertainties and corporate boundary work

This article presents an analysis of risk perception among chain newspaper CEOs in Scandinavia. Based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the analysis finds that risk is perceived in relation to public trust, corporate expansion and contentious government regulation. We discuss these themes in relation to their uncertainty, and the potential gains and losses that accompany them. The aim of the study is to sharpen the distinction between risks, uncertainties and threats as they are mobilized in research on the news industries, contributing to the research on strategic media management at the firm level. The contribution of the study is furthermore to demonstrate how CEOs’ risk perception can be seen as boundary work performed at the corporate level.

Counterculture Of 1960-S and «Underground Press» in the Usa

The Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), later known as Alternative Press Syndicate (APS), was a chain of countercultural newspapers and magazines created in the middle of 1966 by publishers of five early underground newspapers «The East Village Other», «The Los Angeles Free Press», «The Berkeley Barb», «The Paper» and «Fifth Estate». By 1974 the majority of underground papers in the USA ceased to exist but they had an impact on journalistic processes during 1970-s that led to the press development in small towns and countryside giving alternative opinion about local news, cultural news, Native Americans’ politics, ecology, youth and anti-military movements. The article considers the history of “underground press” in the USA, its role and importance for Countercultural Revolution of the 1960-s, which was countrywide in the USA and covered all areas of life.

Remembering Scott Donaldson

Remembering Scott Donaldson J. Gerald Kennedy A month before his death, writing the retrospective piece featured in this issue, Scott Donaldson retold the awkward story included in his biography of the enigmatic Charlie Fenton. I don't mean the details of Scott's sexual initiation in New Haven. Rather, it's the revelation of his delayed Yale graduation after Fenton—then a young faculty member beginning his research for The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway—caught him turning in a class term paper as his senior honors thesis. Scott rehashed that ignominy to remind us that, whatever he later achieved, he had a bumpy start. It's a subtle encouragement to friends and colleagues from a man who remained to the end modest, gracious, and generous, especially to aspiring teachers and scholars. Scott was born in 1928, the son of Frank A. Donaldson Sr. of Minneapolis, a onetime tractor salesman who in 1915 devised an air cleaner for a balky farm engine and transformed his invention into a highly successful business. The Donaldson Company is still thriving—a multinational corporation, supplying filters for heavy-duty equipment. Scott was the baby of the family: his brother Frank Jr. was born in 1920 and his sister Joan in 1927. Like his brother, Scott attended the Blake School, established to prepare young men for Ivy League educations. Frank Jr. was groomed to run the family business: he attended Harvard and served in the Navy before becoming company president. Red-headed, freckle-faced Scott took a different path. As a youngster, he mostly devoted himself to tennis, and by the age of fifteen, he was nationally ranked. He also edited the school newspaper. But his path in life was far from untroubled. When he was fourteen, his mother Ruth died six days before Christmas. Then Frank Sr. remarried, and at seventeen Scott had barely adjusted to having a stepmother when his father also died. At Yale, Scott was by his own account an "undistinguished" English major. According to his widow, Vivie Donaldson, he often remarked that he should never have gone to Yale. He felt out of place and never truly accepted. Most of his classmates went to fancier prep schools or came from more illustrious families. His classmates (all male in that era) included William F. Buckley, Peter Matthiessen, and Robert Scholes. Scott's visit to Fenton's Connecticut home in August 1950 served two purposes: he clarified the work needed to transform his Hemingway paper into an honors thesis, and meeting Fenton's family, Scott also got a glimpse of how university professors lived. [End Page 16] He later remarked that it planted a seed: the idea of becoming a teacher. But Scott was then in a muddle about his future. In the early 1950s, he pursued an M.A. in English at the University of Minnesota. With the Korean War still ongoing, he enlisted in the Army, got shuffled around chaotically, and during a leave married a Long Island socialite, Winifred MarieAnn Davis. She died in a car crash, seven months later, in North Carolina. As the war approached its eventual stalemate, Scott shipped off to Japan, where the Army Security Agency was monitoring Chinese efforts to rearm North Korea. In a base outside Kyoto, Scott transcribed—not very well, he admitted—coded Chinese messages. In Japan, he also met several American war correspondents, and that contact fired an ambition to become a journalist. Back in the states, Scott snagged a reporting job at the Minneapolis Star. During that interval, he also wedded a Minneapolis woman, Janet Kay Mickelson, with whom he raised three sons, Matthew, Stephen, and Andrew. He parlayed his newspaper work into what he later ruefully described as a "three-year mistake in public relations" working for Pillsbury. From that job, he moved to editing the Bloomington Sun. With the help of his brother, he became executive editor of a chain of newspapers around the Twin Cities area. But this immersion in the daily grind of gathering and delivering the news finally reawakened his dream of an academic life. Scott returned to the University of Minnesota in 1963, entering its innovative doctoral program in American Studies. The interdisciplinary approach...

The non-substitutability of local news?Advertising and the decline of journalism's umbrella market model

Abstract This article addresses the challenges facing local newspapers as the digital economy transitions to artificial intelligence (AI). We interview five CEOs of Scandinavian newspaper corporations, representing small, mid-sized, and large newspaper chains. The analysis focuses on three main factors emerging from the interviews – technological transformations, digital advertising markets, and corporate enrolment – and how they relate to business model disruption and the non-substitutability of local news. The analysis is set within the framework of the digital transformation, which, for the purpose of this study, we argue consists of two phases: getting online (until about 2014), and algorithmic adaptation (the introduction of programmatic advertising and audience metrics from about 2014). The analysis concludes that as non-substitutability is lost on the advertising side of the market, this challenges the umbrella model of newspaper publishing.

Enabling Postmedia: Economists as the “Rock Stars” of Canadian Competition Law

Background Canada is suffering a crisis in local news largely attributable to regulatory failure. Its largest newspaper chain, Postmedia Network, took over the second-largest chain in late 2014, and in early 2016 it merged the newsrooms at its duplicate dailies in four of Canada’s six largest cities. Parliamentary hearings on local media ensued, and a mid-2017 report recommended, among other things, changes to the Competition Actto more effectively deal with news media mergers and takeovers. Analysis The Competition Bureau is dominated by economists who may lack sufficient grounding in media issues to effectively deal with mergers and takeovers in news industries. Conclusion and implications Reform of the country’s Competition Act, which has been called for by successive federal media inquiries, is more urgently required than ever.

Strategic and Organisational fit in Corporate News Markets: A Principal-agent Approach to Studying Newspaper Mergers

ABSTRACT This article analyses strategic and organisational fit in corporate newspaper mergers in the context of the digitalisation of local newspaper markets. Using the 2019 acquisition of Nordsjø Media by Amedia in Norway as case, we analyse how eight editors-in-chief perceive the process of incorporating small, low-frequency, print-oriented monopolistic newspapers into one of Scandinavia’s largest newspaper chains. The semi-structured interviews were analysed in light of perceived strategic and organisational fit in a principal-agent theoretical framework, the aim of which is to shed light on corporate ownership effects in consolidated newspaper markets. The analysis reveals the precarity of independent ownership in digitising news markets, to which corporatisation emerges as a necessary and welcomed solution. We find the strategic fit as perceived by editors to be tied to technological resources and scale economics, while organisational fit is hampered by the speed and pressure of corporatisation processes. While these results largely support findings from previous acquisition studies in the news industries, the contribution of this analysis lies primarily with the necessity of scale required by the technological transformation that forces independent newspapers to submit to larger chain operations and how it influences considerations of fit in disruptive digital news markets.

Hubs for innovation: Examining the effects of consolidated news design on quality

In an effort to cut costs, newspaper chains nationwide have consolidated design operations at a few sites. These design hubs have changed the newspaper production process and removed designers from newsrooms; yet, top designers are able to work with their peers in a major city to produce all titles for a chain. This study uses a quantitative analysis of front pages collected from 435 newspapers throughout the United States to examine the quality of newspaper designs at hub and nonhub-designed newspapers. It concludes that hub designed newspapers are generally better designed than nonhub newspapers.

America’s front pages: A 30-year update

The digital revolution has ushered in a new era of front page design, with newspapers of all sizes embracing navigation tools and promotions. This study updates the work of Pasternack and Utt examining newspaper design trends in 1984 and 1995. This study examines the state of current front page design. Furthermore, it explores the use of design hubs and their effect on page design in newspaper chains.

Jack London’s Koreans as “People of the Abyss”

Jack London (1876–1916) was America’s leading novelist and short story writer at the dawn of the twentieth century. He was also a brilliant essayist and feature-writing journalist and a crusading socialist, an impassioned and articulate spokesman for the underclasses. In his essays and in much of his fiction, London was determined to demonstrate the squalid living conditions of the working class. His most poignant work is his 1903 book The People of the Abyss, which brilliantly portrays the economic and social misery of the poor living in London’s great East End slum. London’s thesis is not a condemnation of the wealthy capitalist class per se; instead, he points out the irony that tens of thousands of British subjects were still living and working in conditions of abject degradation in what was supposedly the wealthiest city in the world. London maintained this theme when he traveled to Japan and Korea during the winter and spring of 1904 to report on the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst newspaper chain. His twenty-two feature articles and accompanying photographs portray the squalor and degradation of the Korean people. As was the case the previous year in Great Britain, London’s goal was not to condemn Korea’s ruling class but to showcase the misery of Korea’s mammoth lower classes.

Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism. By Steven M. Avella.

Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism. By Steven M. Avella. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016. xvii + 414 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $36.95.) Here is a painstaking warts-and-all biography of C. K. McClatchy (1858–1936), patriarch of a respected newspaper chain and its flagship paper, the Sacramento Bee . C. K. was a booster of the McClatchy people and papers and his beloved Sacramento and a campaigner for the Progressive movement. He waged battles against government secrecy and public corruption at a time when editors did not have the protection today’s courts provide against libel suits. But McClatchy also was an occasional public drunk, sometimes racist, and often misogynist. (He blamed women voters for the … herb.strentz{at}yahoo.com

Book Review: Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism, by Steven M. Avella

Steven M. Avella Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2016. 441 pp.Part muckraker/part bully, Charles McClatchy used his Sacramento Bee newspaper not only to report the news but also to promote his ideologies. Under his leadership, the paper investigated government corruption, influenced public policy, and manipulated voters while occasionally attacking individuals and societal groups. Although McClatchy and the Bee greatly affected early California politics and development, previous writings about him were scant. This exhaustive biography by Avella, a Marquette University history professor, solidly establishes McClatchy's place in journalism history while providing an insider's view of late 19th century to early 20th century newsroom practices.In researching the book, Avella examined 10,000 linear feet of records contained in the McClatchy Papers: nearly 287 volumes of business and personal correspondence penned by McClatchy and other family members, news stories from the Sacramento Bee, McClatchy's columns, and stories published in competing newspapers. The 63-page index alone is testament to the substantial research performed to create this book.Journalism was a family affair for Charles McClatchy and Sacramento was the hub of his universe. His father, James, wrote stories about the Gold Rush for Horace Greeley and joined the Sacramento Bee staff soon after it was launched. It was an exciting time to be in the news business; California was still acclimating to statehood and there was plenty of news to cover. Charles McClatchy came aboard the Bee two decades after his father and was a partner by his 21st birthday. Having inherited the paper when their father died in 1883, Charles and his brother Valentine worked hard to build it into a major journalism force in Northern California and beyond. (Today, The McClatchy Company is the second largest newspaper chain in the United States.) In a 1911 letter to his brother, Charles extolled the Bee asa tower of righteousness and a terror to evil doers . . . an unceasing friend to every great public cause of right, the unflinching foe of every monstrous public wrong. I have made it almost a Bible in our section of California. It is respected wherever it is read. (p. 2)Avella deftly documents how McClatchy's opinion of his beloved newspaper was both true and false. To be sure, the Bee bravely tackled the biggest issues facing the young state: damage to downstream farmland caused by hydraulic gold mining, inordinate political influence by railroad companies, bribery and extortion by San Francisco civic leaders, a government cover-up of a deadly bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco's Chinatown, social vices, and ongoing efforts to modernize Sacramento. However, all readers did not appreciate the newspaper's efforts. Many libel suits were brought against the Bee. Some were successful although the monetary judgments were minimal. In addition, a typographers' strike and advertising boycott that lasted more than four months nearly killed the newspaper.When not reporting the news, McClatchy relished using the Bee to publicly vilify individuals he mistrusted and sectors of society he outright detested. He even hired a private investigator, on at least two occasions, to investigate a local newspaper editor and a Catholic priest who edited a religious newspaper. …

The Never-ending Story: Postmedia, the Competition Bureau, and Press Ownership in Canada

The 2014 purchase by Canada’s largest newspaper chain of its second-largest chain increased concentration of newspaper ownership considerably. The deal’s 2015 approval by the Competition Bureau, some scholars noted, provoked little outcry over the latest federal regulatory failure to stop the increased concentration level. A series of inquiries, from the 1981 report of the Royal Commission on Newspapers to Senate reports in 1970 and 2006, all identified increased concentration of newspaper ownership as a problem and proposed measures to solve it. Formed in the 1980s, the Competition Bureau took action against a local newspaper monopoly in Vancouver in the early 1990s but has been ineffective since. This study charts the historical progress of newspaper ownership concentration in Canada and calculates that Postmedia now publishes 37.6 percent of Canadian paid daily newspaper circulation and owns fifteen of the twenty-two largest Englishlanguage dailies. That includes 75.4 percent in the three westernmost provinces, where Postmedia owns eight of the nine largest dailies. Possible explanations for a lack of outcry include the company’s use of the “death of newspapers” meme as justification and the fact the deal’s effect was felt mostly in Western Canada, far from the corridors of power.

A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of America’s Pastime at the University of Wisconsin by Steven D. Schmitt

Reviewed by: A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of America’s Pastime at the University of Wisconsin by Steven D. Schmitt Lee Lowenfish Steven D. Schmitt. A History of Badger Baseball: The Rise and Fall of America’s Pastime at the University of Wisconsin. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2017, 342 pp. Cloth, $29.95. It comes as a shock to most people that the University of Wisconsin is the only Big Ten conference member not to field a baseball team. This unfortunate state of affairs dates back to after the 1991 season when after 117 years of college play and 1445 victories, the plug was pulled on the Badger program by [End Page 188] cost-conscious administrators concerned about low attendance and revenue and Title IX regulations demanding the addition of women’s sports. As someone who earned an MA and PhD at UW–Madison in the 1960s and who has since become a fervent follower of Badger basketball and football teams, I find the situation distressing. So does veteran Wisconsin general reporter and sportswriter Steven D. Schmitt. Happily, instead of whining, he has done what a good historian must do—dig into the past to recreate the neglected years of Badger baseball history. In so doing, he has produced a book that is a meticulous chronological chronicle of a sport that has always been a stepchild in the athletic department and yet has produced many winning seasons, a 1950 College World Series participant, and developed many major leaguers, especially after World War Two. Informed readers will recognize many of the names. Among them are catcher John “Red” Wilson who also was a Badger football center; shortstop Harvey Kuenn (later an outfielder, batting champion, and Milwaukee Brewers World Series manager); bonus baby outfielder John DeMerit rushed to the majors to play a small part in the Milwaukee Braves 1957 World Series-winning season; southpaw Jim O’Toole, and outfielder Rick Reichardt, a great football running back whose 1964 $205,000 baseball bonus precipitated the passage of the free agent amateur draft in 1965. Schmitt has dug deep into Reichardt’s story, citing a remarkable four-part NBC national television series, Odyssey of a Bonus Baby—The Courting of Rick Reichardt, reported by future Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Wolff. (In a rare error in the book, Schmitt misspells Wolff ’s name as Wolf.) “Cameras recorded Reichardt’s every move” (122), Schmitt writes—from the superstar’s home town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin to the Sunset Strip and Malibu in southern California where he eventually signs with owner Gene Autry’s California Angels. At a party for Stanley Kramer’s movie Ship of Fools, actor Lee Marvin advises young Reichardt to get all the money he can from the owner. (A serious kidney injury kept Reichardt from fulfilling his great promise but he did experience an eleven-year major league career cut short probably by his active participation in the Players Association at the dawn of free agency.) Another delicious tidbit Schmitt has unearthed is that before Red Wilson arrived in Madison, he played for the national high school team against New York high schoolers in the 1947 annual All-Star game at the Polo Grounds sponsored by the Hearst newspaper chain. Wilson’s manager was Ray Schalk, the upright catcher on the 1919 Black Sox, and one of his coaches was Honus Wagner. [End Page 189] The first chapters of Badger Baseball will be of interest to sports historians. Schmitt informs us that like most universities at the turn of the twentieth century, Wisconsin was roiling with the controversy about whether high-level competitive sport belonged in a university devoted to learning. In 1906, Wisconsin actually dropped both football and baseball, but three years later in the fall of 1909 the reinstated baseball team “made the longest trip ever taken by college athletes-seven thousand miles” (24) to play nine games against two Japanese university teams. Masao Matsuoka, a political science graduate of UW, was the inspiration for the trip that drew the praise of none other than President William Howard Taft who said “it cannot be but of advantage to the universities in...

Book Review: Marc Edge, Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers

Marc Edge, Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers (Vancouver, Canada: New Star Books, 2014). Paperback. 320 pages, $21.Reviewed by Matthew J. HaughtDOI: 10.1177/0739532915587300On its final day of publishing in 2007, The Cincinnati Post anchored its front page with a -30-. The longtime copyediting symbol for the end of a story marked the end of Ohio's Queen City's afternoon daily and, in part, the end of the competing afternoon daily as a whole.At the time, many observers and critics of the newspaper industry thought the -30-for The Post would become a -30- for the entire industry. In Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers, Marc Edge uses the weapon of perspective to skewer the fault in their logic. He examines the ways newspaper industry insiders and critics positioned the declines and changes at the end of the 2000s as the harbinger of for the printed news. Their claims overstated the problems, he argues. Instead, corporate greed drove the cuts to the industry.Soundly researched, the book details the economics of the industry and offers those economics as the reason afternoon, second-place daily newspapers went the way of the dodo, or perhaps, the linotype machine. He decodes the complexities of newspaper finances, including advertising revenue, circulation, expenses and the write down of value loss associated with the downturn of advertising during the Great Recession. This process cleanly argues the Wall Street ownership of newspaper chains has deemphasized quality to keep profit margins inflated-double that of other industries.Edge's no-holds-barred book names names of the naysayers and doomsday mongers, as well as the owners and executives at newspaper companies who cowed to investors instead of fighting to preserve the newsroom. He cites the industry's vast profit margins, in excess of 20 percent for some chains, and their declines into the single digits during the recession, as the chief cause for much of the industry's transformation. His argument here delivers the analytics lacking in many reports about the death of printed news.As I read Edge's book, I anticipated an account of my former newspaper, the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail; however, it was not found. In 2004, MediaNews Group sold the Daily Mail, then an afternoon newspaper, to the larger morning Charleston Gazette, effectively dissolving the newspapers' joint operating agreement. The Gazette leadership began systematically diluting the Mail's operations, cutting staff from more than 50 to about 20. After much public and advertiser outcry, intervention by the Department of Justice restored much of the Mail's staff, and rulings put major restrictions on the Gazette's ownership and operation of the Mail, which switched to the morning cycle in 2009 and continues to compete.1 The Gazette-Mail saga illustrates many of Edge's arguments: the of a second-place afternoon daily, the complications of joint operating agreements, the engagement brought by competing newspapers (The Gazette and Mail offer countering viewpoints about political issues in West Virginia's capital city) and the impact of advertiser and community support for a printed newspaper.Edge unabashedly advocates for printed newspapers; unfortunately, he's one of the few left to do this. He claims newspapers have righted the ship in terms of revenue and have returned to the print edition as a vehicle for profit, albeit with less of a wall between news and advertising. Further, pay walls and metered content online are still forcing people to pay, tapping that revenue stream. …

“YOU WILL FIND GERMANY IN PEACE AND ORDER”

This case study documents the news reporting of Edward J. Meeman (1889–1966), who was among the first reporters from the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain to visit Germany after the Nazis consolidated their power in the summer of 1933. The completeness of the record surrounding Meeman's month-long visit makes his reporting from Germany an excellent way to examine the issues that visiting US journalists faced in the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship and the quality of information they could obtain about the regime. This paper, in particular, contributes to our understanding of how much of Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic foundations were evident to visiting American journalists in 1933.

Newspaper Chains in Finland 1993–2010

This study describes newspaper chain development from 1993 to 2010 in Finland. Chain is defined as a publisher owning at least two subscribed newspapers appearing 1–7 times a week. As a background, the main features of the Finnish newspaper industry structure are presented. The results show a decrease in the number of chains from 24 in 2000 to 19 in 2010 and a decrease in the number of the group-owned dailies from 44 to 42. The share of the total circulation of the largest chains has decreased from 2005 to 2010.

An Accidental Success Story: The Forced Diversification of Quebecor Media

Canada’s news media ownership landscape changed dramatically in 2009–10 with the bankruptcy of Canwest Global Communication and the voluntary separation of the CTV network from the Globe and Mail national newspaper. These developments suggested failure of the newspaper-television convergence business model adopted by these companies a decade ago. One company has been able to make the convergence model work in Canada, however. Quebecor Media acquired the TVA network in Québec in 2000 to go along with its chain of French-language newspapers in Quebec and the Sun Media national chain of English dailies it acquired in 1998. It subsequently acquired the Osprey newspaper chain to become one of the country’s largest newspaper publishers. Unlike other converged media companies in Canada and the U.S., however, Quebecor has remained profitable despite the recession that began in 2008. This paper examines financial data, including CRTC monitoring reports and annual reports from Quebecor and other companies, in an attempt to explain its success. One factor found to be of significance has been Quebecor’s diversification into more profitable areas, such as cable television and cellular telephony.

Los Angeles before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915. By Jan Olsson. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 479 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-9188468-06-2.)

Jan Olsson has produced an important book that reconceptualizes the early cultural history of the cinema in the United States. Los Angeles before Hollywood delineates the mutually constitutive relationship of cinema and popular urban journalism as cultural phenomena. Breaking from film historians' traditional reliance on trade papers as source material and their focus on New York in their studies of early film, Olsson draws on mainstream Los Angeles newspapers to examine the development of film culture in Los Angeles and the role of the popular press in defining the social experience of film. Newspaper coverage validated the emerging medium and mediated the cinema's relationships with different publics, from movie audiences to social reformers. In negotiating debates over the role of the cinema in urban life, the popular press became a public forum for cultural contests over modernity. The press not only commented on films and actors but the practices of spectatorship as well. The press policed the cinema and the rituals of cinemagoing by subjecting them to a critical gaze. Olsson describes several successive stages of press interaction with the cinema, each characterized by a different angle of vision. During the first stage, the press reported on the movies as an oddity and spectacle. Later stages were “flaneurian”—reporters sauntering on city streets commented on the practices of nickelodeon spectatorship. There were also regulatory interventions, as when the press turned on the cinema the searching and systematic gaze of the social reformer. The final stage in this period was marked by the emergence of mutually profitable ties between the motion picture industry and the press. Olsson outlines several collaborations between the press and the motion picture industry, including newspapers' distribution of coupons for film showings and a newsreel series that was a joint venture between a film company and the Hearst newspaper chain.

How the Camel Got in the Tent: The Canadian Assault on Australia's Foreign Media Ownership Limits

Before 1991, Australia enforced strict limits on foreign ownership of licensed broadcasters and also limited foreign ownership of newspaper publishers. In the early 1990s, however, a pair of Canadian entrepreneurs succeeded in first raising and then circumventing those limits. Conrad Black bought 15 per cent of the Fairfax newspaper chain in 1992, and shortly before the ensuing national election lobbied to increase his stake to 25 per cent. In his 1993 autobiography, Black described backroom political dealings that resulted in a Senate inquiry. The Australian Broadcasting Authority soon began an investigation into another Canadian challenging the country's foreign media ownership limits. Israel ‘Izzy’ Asper, a former tax lawyer, found a way to legally purchase 57.5 per cent of Network Ten in 1992 by holding 42.5 per cent in the form of non-voting debentures. The ABA absolved his CanWest Global Communications of controlling Network Ten in 1995. Non-voting shares were outlawed in 1997, but CanWest was allowed to retain its debentures. The inquiries into Canadian purchases contributed to a decade-long process of re-evaluating media ownership limits that resulted in restrictions on foreign ownership being eliminated in 2006.