Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff Read Free Book Online Page B

best-selling author of the historical novels
Arundel
and
Northwest Passage.
    Edwin Grozier compensated for his lack of physical presence with what Roberts called “newspaper genius.” From the moment he took control of the paper, Grozier operated under a few guiding principles he once articulated: “Of first importance is the securing of the confidence, respect, and affection of your readers—by deserving them. Study the census. Know your field. Build scientifically. Print a little better newspaper than you think the public wants. Do not try to rise by pulling your contemporaries down. Attend to your own business. Do not believe your kind friends if they assure you that you are a genius. But work, work, work.”
    He issued a public call to arms in his debut editorial: “By performance rather than promise the new
Post
seeks to be judged. By deed rather than words its record will be made.” He declared that the
Post
“aspires to guard the public interests, to be a bulwark against political corruption, an ally of justice and a scourge to crime; to defend the oppressed, to help the poor, to further the still grander development of the glorious civilization of New England.”
    Grand sentiments were one thing, but Grozier knew he had to meet a payroll and the demands of creditors. His first actions on those fronts were counterintuitive: He dropped the paper’s price from three cents to a penny—a technique he had learned from Pulitzer to boost circulation—and lowered the cost of advertising. He also called a meeting of his creditors and asked their forbearance; he would pay them in full, he promised, but he needed time and more credit to keep afloat. Impressed by his sincerity, and hoping to avoid the pennies-on-the-dollar payoff that would result from Grozier’s failure, the creditors agreed. Still, the early years remained lean, and paydays were sometimes anxious. Grozier never missed a payroll, but more than once his staff gathered at the cashier’s window waiting to be paid from last-minute advertising receipts and the pennies turned in by newsboys. Sometimes even that was not enough, and Grozier borrowed to pay his staff.
    â€œMost of the time, figuratively speaking, there was an ‘angel’ in one room and the sheriff in another,” Grozier once recalled. “An angel, you know, is someone who may possibly put up money to back you. But I was generally much more certain of the sheriff than I was of the angel.” What he needed most were readers, lots of them, so he tapped the techniques he had learned from Pulitzer and added new flavors all his own. Soon they paid off handsomely.
    To capture public interest and build circulation, Grozier was not above employing carnival tactics, organizing a stream of inspired and slightly wacky promotions. He heard that an Englishman and his wife wanted to rid themselves of three trained elephants named Mollie, Waddy, and Tony. Grozier thought they would make ideal residents at the city’s Franklin Park Zoo. He was making enough money by this point that he could have paid for them himself and reaped all sorts of praise, but instead the
Post
called upon the children of Boston to become part owners of the pachyderms. The newspaper began collecting contributions toward the $15,000 purchase price. Grozier promised to print the names of every one of the contributors, even those who could spare only a cent or two. Thousands of children responded, and seventy thousand people turned out to welcome the elephants at a ceremony in Fenway Park, built two years earlier by the
Globe
’s Taylor as the new home of the Red Sox. From a simple profit-loss standpoint, it was a disaster. It cost the
Post
thirty cents, based on its advertising rate, to print the name of a child who had contributed a penny, and the newspaper still had to cough up several thousand dollars to close the deal. But Grozier knew it was a huge