Canadian businessman eyes The Inquirer

He's a British Columbia businessman who now owns his old hometown newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, the largest paper in a city of 630,000 people in the middle of Canada's vast heartland.

He's a lawyer and entrepreneur who since the 1970s has invested in magazines, paper mills, printing, clothing manufacturing, horticultural products, even water-technology start-ups.

Now Ronald N. Stern wants to own The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. His Vancouver company, Stern Partners Inc., is one of the three groups bidding for Philadelphia Newspapers L.L.C. at a bankruptcy auction Tuesday in New York City.

Stern did not respond to phone messages Monday, and it's not clear how his role in the process could play out. But his hope is plainly to reprise his purchase of the Free Press, in which he emerged as a dark-horse bidder in October 2001 and bested larger players such as CanWest Global Communications Corp.

Stern and his partner, Bob Silver, paid about $150 million (Canadian) for the Free Press and the smaller Brandon Sun, according to news accounts. A magazine profile dubbed them "media barons in the making."

Since then, Stern has added sparingly to his media holdings, chiefly by acquiring Canstar Community News, a group of community and special-interest papers in the Winnipeg, Manitoba, area.

Though some observers questioned why a western Canadian businessman would covet the Philadelphia papers, newspaper analyst John Morton said the bid for The Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com made sense for Stern as an investor looking for undervalued properties.

Morton said the physical assets of Philadelphia Newspapers, including its buildings and printing equipment, were enough "to cover an awful lot of any acquisition price."

Morton and others familiar with the Winnipeg newspaper's operation described Stern as a savvy businessman who has been able to stay ahead of declines in circulation and advertising sales by cutting costs. "It's an efficiently run company," Morton said.

Although the Winnipeg paper has been through turbulent times recently - it suffered a 16-day strike in 2008, and a year earlier hired its third publisher in three years - it apparently has managed to remain profitable, and also to win praise for its journalism.

Last year, the Free Press won the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Excellence in Journalism award - the first paper in western Canada to do so, said Mary Lynn Young, associate professor at the University of British Columbia and director of its graduate school of journalism.

"I only have good things to say about the paper," Young said. "My knowledge of Ron Stern is that he's really contributed to a vibrant newspaper in that city."

Stern's entry into the newspaper business came after years of investments in other sectors.

News accounts say he first partnered with Silver in 1978, when he helped his fellow Canadian save an ailing family business. And Stern Partners' list of properties includes Alberta Newsprint Co., which he and a group of partners built from scratch in the 1980s as that province's first paper mill.

Stern, despite his widely dispersed business interests, seems to desire to stay out of the news himself.

"There's not a lot known - he keeps an extremely low profile," said Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun.

Details about Stern's personal history are hard to come by, though he apparently has known his share of tragedy. In 1995, his 9-year-old daughter, Sara, died in a skiing accident, according to a Sun story.

A Sun columnist reported in 2005 that Stern was the son of a businessman who owned a General Motors dealership in his hometown of Winnipeg and a farm-implement sales operation in Regina, Saskatchewan, and grew up during an era that may seem distant today, even in rural Canada.

Columnist Malcolm Parry said Stern once told the story of a hectic season at the Regina business, and a day when an entire combine harvester simply seemed to vanish - a mystery solved some days later when a farmer turned up with a wad of cash.

As Stern recounted the story, Parry said, the farmer told Stern's father, "You were so busy that day, you told me to get it off the lot and we'd write up the deal later."

After college at the University of North Alabama and law school at the University of British Columbia, Stern was admitted to the bar in 1973, according to the Martindale.com legal directory.

Stern's early years as a businessman and media entrepreneur had their colorful elements, according to a Canadian Business magazine profile.

Two years after becoming a lawyer, he acquired what Parry called the "then-moribund Vancouver magazine."

Stern began building a mini-empire of magazines, including city magazines in Calgary and Edmonton, a business-and-politics magazine called Equity, and an in-flight magazine for Alaska Airlines.

The Canadian Business profile said Stern paid $1 million for Vancouver magazine and agreed to acquire its debts, and sold it eight years later for $2.8 million.

"During the time, the freewheeling magazine published works from environmentalists, logger-poets and even a fictitious interview with Andy Warhol that the pop artist, tongue in cheek, later said was the best interview he ever gave," the profile said.

By the standards of many U.S. journalists, the recent path of the Free Press might also raise some eyebrows.

Last year, in a cost-cutting move, it ended home delivery of its Sunday newspaper, although it has beefed up its larger Saturday paper as a weekend edition and created a Sunday tabloid aimed at younger readers and sports enthusiasts.

Along the way, the broadsheet Free Press' front page was redesigned as an elaborate contents page - just headlines, pictures, and teasers to stories that run inside the paper.

In circulation, the Free Press at least seems to be holding its own. Its 2005 circulation on Saturdays, its largest day, averaged 166,325, according to the Canadian Newspaper Association. By 2009, that had dipped to 163,006. But in its latest report, for the six months ending March 31, it was back up to 165,667.