"Somewhere along the line, I decided that if I was ever going to run a newspaper, it would have to be one with lots of problems," Roberts says. "At a successful paper, there's resistance to change. If everything is coming up roses, why plant petunias?"
He had mentioned this someday-ambition to his friend Lee Hills, who had a habit of taking detailed shorthand notes of every conversation. In the summer of 1972, Hills, then chief executive officer of Knight Newspapers Inc., went to see Roberts, who was in Miami running the New York Times' coverage of the presidential conventions.
"He whipped out a notebook," Roberts recalls. "And said, 'On such-and-such a date, you said, "If I were ever to leave the Times, it would be to run a paper that was in trouble." ' Then Hills declaimed, 'I have just such a paper.' "
Under Roberts' deliberate, if often inscrutable, leadership, the paper would rise from the ignominy of the hubris and corruption of its previous decade to become one of the most respected dailies in the country. It would grow to be a veritable Pulitzer Prize machine, powered by a staff of young, ambitious reporters who were encouraged, as never before, to pursue stories in depth, undaunted by corporate threats to pull advertising, and undeterred by officials who were used to hiding and lying.
At the time, the Bulletin was the city's paper of record, admired for its encyclopedic coverage of the region, but stodgy and averse to risk. William K. Marimow, who worked there on the business news staff briefly before jumping to The Inquirer in 1972, recalled, "The editorial page always examined issues from both sides and never reached a conclusion."
Roberts, convinced that only one newspaper could survive in the city, resolved that The Inquirer would prevail. He planned to pummel the competition with news coverage that was intrepid and fair.
The ambition seemed preposterous.
