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Four years ago, as San Diego was just emerging from its deepest recession since the Great Depression, Keith Lister sat at an outdoor café on La Jolla Boulevard, reviewing the books of the old Metropolitan, which was declining in revenue. A cautious man, he advised us against purchasing the decade-old magazine.
This time, we ignored his advice for a variety of reasons. With a benign reputation, the old Metropolitan had established a circulation that was triple the Business Journal's and five times the Transcript's, was being delivered door-to-door to the suites of most of the major office buildings in the Golden Triangle, Kearny Mesa, Mission Valley and Downtown.
Its place on office lunch tables could be improved by ratcheting up the editorial content to speak to the professionals and CEOs, which is the best strategy for reaching an even larger audience of ambitious upwardly mobile office workers. (We need to read what the boss reads.) A team of San Diego’s most experienced business journalists, refugees from the Union-Tribune, Business Journal and mostly the Transcript, was eager to find a progressive new home. By focusing sharply on the urban revival of the inner city and the technology revolutions of the outer city, we could connect, moving from the lunch table to the bedroom nightstand. And we did.
On July 30, 1996, we closed escrow and took over, redesigned the rag to please the eye and the intellect, and with this edition, we observe our third anniversary under new ownership. August 1999 marks our sixth consecutive month in the black, in our first calendar year of profitable operation, so far, while driving an enterprise that in 1999 will better than triple the revenue of what the business generated three years ago.
No smoke or mirrors, no exploitation of the capital market; we scraped together some cash, wrote an old-fashion business plan, submitted it to the bank and the SBA, executed, and indeed later hit up one investor, John G. Davies, for a single, modest infusion of capital.
We fired up sandiegometro.com, which still operates today as the deepest database of San Diego business information to be introduced to the World Wide Web in the last 4-1/2 years, continued publishing the Guide to Downtown San Diego to stimulate tourism in the inner city, lent our "Daily Business Report" efforts to Classical X-BACH Stereo and our editor to KPBS-FM's "These Days," took over the Uptown Examiner to help small businesses, governments and lawyers get their legal notices published inexpensively, and in the process captured numerous journalism and civic awards, not the least of which were the Society of Professional Journalists' first place for layout and design, and two James Julian Memorial Awards for Community Service.
To this day, we dare say no one has written more about Irwin Jacobs' telecommunications, or Patti Roscoe's hospitality industry, or Dave Dinerman's manufacturing sector, or Tom Larwin's transportation. We report voluminously on small businesses, banking, biotechnology and real estate. We are driven by a passion for good writing and the realization that so very little attention is given to private enterprise in most publications, though private enterprise fuels two-thirds of our economy. And yet, we don’t ignore public enterprise; we called next year’s mayor's race last January.
We boosted our circulation to 50,000 copies and have it routinely audited to prove the Metropolitan gets into the hands of the right people, including every member of the Carlsbad, Escondido, Rancho Bernardo and Greater San Diego Chambers of Commerce, every member of the Building Industry Association of San Diego County, every member of the Downtown Partnership and Port Tenants Association, all clients of Accion San Diego, every household in the county valued by the assessor at $700,000 or more, the top two executives of nearly every San Diego County member company of UCSD Connect, the top two executives of virtually every publicly traded corporation and bank based in San Diego County, and most recently, every member of the San Diego Venture Group. We’ve strengthened bulk delivery in Carlsbad, Del Mar, the Golden Triangle, Kearny Mesa, Mission Valley, Hillcrest, Downtown and elsewhere, and we’re still going door-to-door in most of the office towers.
And we’ve kept our advertising rates low. We offer the least expensive, heaviest full-color glossy pages in the market and the lowest cost-per-thousand-readers on glossy or text pages. We value our readers greatly, but we understand that journalism doesn’t exist unless we’re delivering great value to our advertisers, who foot the bill. And it’s working. To quote Phil Goodrich, senior group manager of human resources and business operations at Nokia Mobile Phones Inc., "We have received a tremendous amount of exposure and feedback (resulting) in additional business relationships and an increase in résumés. No other publication locally could have given us this type of exposure and image."
We work very, very hard to make it happen.
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And so Keith Lister was too prudent in advising against our purchase and conversion of the Metropolitan, but this is a melancholy acknowledgement.
Two days before John F. Kennedy Jr.'s ashes were scattered off Martha's Vineyard with journalists' telephoto lenses trying to pry, Keith Lister's were quietly cast off Point Loma from a Cal 32, just like the sloop Cholita that he, Lowell North and Malin Burnham sailed to victories in the 1960s. Malin and Roberta Burnham were there, as were Mr. Lister's children, Priscilla and Janet, and his two grandchildren. "He was just an honest, down-to-earth, great guy, a straight shooter, a true gentleman," said Bill Munster.
Before he retired in 1992 as publisher of the Daily Transcript, which he'd acquired in 1972, Mr. Lister employed much of the San Diego Metropolitan's editorial team. Tim McClain, Herb Lockwood, Janet Lowe, Lynne Carrier, Priscilla Lister, Libby Brydolf, John Lamb, Rich Acello, Pam Wilson, Denise Carabet and I all worked for him, as did others who help us here. He was a shy man; he didn’t write columns or speak publicly. He was a tough employer, but fair. In 1976 he refused to hire me because Carabet had just left and he wanted to replace her with another woman, Jane Applegate, although he gave me the nod a year later.
From Mr. Lister we learned about business, real estate and banking, and from his top executive from 1973 to 1981, Bob Witty, we learned about good journalism. Witty was quoted in one of Mr. Lister's obituaries as saying, "He gave me a free hand. He never second-guessed me. He never directed me in news coverage," which is why they never argued.
Witty was gone when Mr. Lister did second-guess staff, moving a story about a legal blow to the ex-head of the Women's Bank of San Diego from the front page to the inside of the newspaper, because he didn’t want to embarrass the banker too much. Such intervention smacked of unwarranted censorship, we thought at the time.
But with time, we realized, Mr. Lister taught us compassion.
In 1989, Mr. Lister intervened again by reading — uncharacteristically prior to publication — every word of an exhaustive four-part series chronicling the demise of Great American Bank. It was a damning series, in part, about an admired contemporary, Gordon Luce, whose brother Edgar played poker routinely with Mr. Lister at the University Club. Mr. Lister hated every word that was written, changed not one, and its publication earned the Society of Professional Journalists' highest recognition for community service in San Diego.
From Mr. Lister, we witnessed courage.
Not as well chronicled, because he wasn’t previously surrounded by a bunch of writers, were Keith Lister's years spent in banking and finance. From Fraser Mortgage Co. to San Diego Federal Savings & Loan, Palomar Mortgage Co. to Lister Investment Co., Southcoast Capital to the City Bank of San Diego, through the 1950s and 1960s Mr. Lister financed thousands of projects, including the original Islandia Hotel, but mostly homes from Fleetridge to Clairemont. As important as journalists like to think they are, bankers are a lot more essential. Bankers help make home ownership possible and finance businesses that provide jobs, products and services, including journalism businesses.
Mr. Lister's most important service, next to parenting two daughters, probably was serving in the Navy during World War II. A native of Clio, Iowa, he married Margaret Jean "Peggy" Boman in 1940, and they moved originally to San Diego in 1942. She died in 1993, and he remained broken-hearted until their reunion June 26. He was 81.
Mr. Lister, like an overly cautious father, did not expect us to move into the black in our third year of operation. Statistically, 80 percent of small businesses fail in their first three years. He would have hated being the one to encourage us to take such risk and then watch us flop.
We understand that we owe everything to our advertisers and avid readers and we shall remain enormously grateful to you.
But it was our time with Keith Lister, with his courage and compassion, that brought us to those crossroads a few years ago. We took a path he could not see. Upon this milestone in life, death and commerce in San Diego, he'd be growling at us for losing one paid subscriber.
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