Longtime news executive William J. Keating dead at 93

William J Keating, who spent three decades as an Ohio newspaper executive after leaving Congress in the mid-1970s, has died, his family confirmed. He was 93. The Cincinnati native led The Cincinnati Enquirer as president and later as publisher. He served on the board of The Associated Press for 25 years, chairing the global news organization from 1987 to 1992. He also held executive positions in the Gannett Co., where he served as general counsel, a regional newspaper president, and helped put together the joint operating agreement that combined the business operations of Detroit's two competing daily newspapers.

Genial and modest, but driven and fiercely competitive, Keating was a champion swimmer who is in the University of Cincinnati athletic hall of fame. He helped build a Cincinnati law firm from scratch and had a flourishing political career until he gave up his U.S. House seat in 1974 to become The Enquirer's president. He brought a skilled politician's touch with him to the newspaper industry as he worked with journalists, unions, civic and business leaders. As AP chairman, he also had working relationships with some of the most powerful people in the newspaper industry.

“Bill was masterful,” said Louis D Boccardi, former AP president and CEO. “He had political instincts, and I mean that in the best sense. He knew his constituency. He was very careful and considerate of the views of other people.” Douglas H. McCorkindale, retired CEO and chairman of Gannett, said Keating had served in Congress during a time when representatives were more likely than today to try to amiably work out deals and compromise while getting along with each other. He called that approach “The Keating style.” “Bill was able to get things done by working with people,” said McCorkindale, also a former AP board member. “He was able to work with very diverse groups. He did that very well in the newspaper business.” At The Enquirer, he helped engineer a 1977 joint operating agreement with The Cincinnati Post in which The Enquirer took over circulation and other business operations of the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned rival daily. The Post published until the end of 2007, when the agreement expired. He was assigned another tough challenge for Gannett, heading the Detroit Newspaper Agency from 1986 to 1990 that combined business operations of Gannett's News and Knight-Ridder's Free Press. “Bill was an expert at doing the right thing, and just getting it done correctly, even if it sometimes alienated some people,” McCorkindale said. “If it was the right thing to do in the long term, you could count on Bill do that. Doing the right thing sometimes takes guts, doing what you have to do.” Keating went to St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati, served in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II, then studied business administration at the University of Cincinnati and went on to earn his law degree there while in the Air Force Reserve.

Fresh out of law school, he went door-to-door visiting big law firms and urged them to send cases they didn't want his way. He was a founding partner of what became a major Cincinnati law firm, served as an assistant Ohio attorney general, then a municipal judge, and was elected Hamilton County common pleas judge in 1964 — as a Republican overcoming the Lyndon B. Johnson Democratic presidential landslide in that election. Keating was a leading vote-getter in Cincinnati city council elections in 1967 and 1969. He ran for an open U.S. House seat in 1971, and won that year and in 1973 by landslide margins. In 1974, he stunned Cincinnati's political world by giving up his seat in midterm to respond to a request by Carl Lindner Jr., a law client and perhaps Cincinnati's most powerful businessman, to run the newspaper that Lindner had bought a few years earlier. “I said, 'I don't know anything about newspapers except to be interviewed,'” Keating recounted in a 2005 oral history interview with an Associated Press archivist. “And so I did. I came back, and just lived there. Trying to figure out how it worked.” His first-year challenges included a newsprint shortage and a Teamsters strike that disrupted publication. He also worked through a printing technique transition to “cold type,” based on photographic printing that speeded up production and cut costs. Circulation and profits grew. Gannett acquired The Enquirer and made Keating president of its Central group of newspapers. He served as executive vice president and general counsel for Gannett in 1985-86, and led the Detroit project as its CEO in 1986-90.

Editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman won a Pulitzer Prize at The Enquirer in 1991, the year before Keating retired.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)