By the time he died of cancer last week at 56 (leaving behind a wife, Nancy, and three children), his determination, talent and gall had carried him to the top of his profession. Maynard was best known for purchasing the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune in 1983, becoming the first black owner of a major metropolitan daily in America. At the time he was already the Tribune’s editor; but the parent company, Gannett, was acquiring a television station and Federal Communications Commission rules required that the company give up the newspaper. Maynard startled a Gannett executive by announcing that he wanted to buy the Tribune himself. “Well, that’s going to be mighty difficult for you to do,” the executive replied. “Give me a chance to try,” Maynard shot back.
Maynard purchased the paper for $22 million without putting down a dime of his own. The press, in telling the story, focused principally on the new owner’s race. Maynard himself preferred to accentuate the fact that he had orchestrated the first management-leveraged buyout of an American newspaper–an important accomplishment irrespective of the color of his skin.
The brashness that enabled him to close the Tribune deal propelled him through life. The son of Barbadian immigrants, Maynard dropped out of high school at 16 to pursue a writing career and never looked back. While in school he had written for the New York Age-Defender, one of the nation’s oldest black newspapers; but his reporting career with the mainstream press began in 1961 at a daily newspaper in York, Pa. The daily newspaper world was then virtually all white, and not many papers felt compelled to change that. Before getting The York Gazette and Daily to hire him, Maynard had sent out more than 300 applications to papers around the country. He never forgot that experience. Years later, Maynard became a leader of the movement to integrate the newspaper industry. “Maybe more than any other person [he] energized that effort at a crucial time in the ’70s when the attention of both the nation and the news business had turned away from such questions,” says Jay Harris, vice president for operations at Knight-Ridder Inc.
Maynard entered the big-city journalism world in 1967, after meeting Benjamin Bradlee, then managing editor of The Washington Post, at Harvard University, where Maynard was a Nieman fellow. He picked a fight with Bradlee, so impressing him that, months later, when Maynard came calling, Bradlee gave him a job. Maynard instantly became a star reporter. Over time, he moved up, becoming an assistant managing editor and ombudsman; but by the late 1970s he was eager for a bigger challenge.
He found two. The first was the Institute for journalism Education, an organization he cofounded and initially led, whose primary mission was to create opportunities for minority journalists in America’s newspapers. Over the years, IJE trained hundreds. His second challenge was the Tribune. A gifted editor who loved to work with copy, Maynard made improving the paper a mission; he also took pride in hiring what he often claimed was the most ethnically diverse staff on any major paper. Still, he ultimately bad to face a hard reality: in a difficult market in recession, he could not make the paper profitable. He sold it in 1992.
The defeat did not diminish his stature: everyone in his circle knew he had been dealt a losing hand. That he had felt he could overcome the odds was characteristic; he had been doing that all his life. That he managed to convince so many others that he could was a testament to the specialness of the man.
