Paul Miller, an executive of the Gannett Company for twenty-one years, was the architect of a newspaper-acquisition program that made Gannett not only the largest newspaper chain in the United States, but the most widespread geographically. That geographic breadth provided the company with a broad economic base that insulated its profits from regional downturns. It also gave it a national dimension lacking in the nineteen-paper, mostly upstate New York chain that Miller inherited from founder Frank E. Gannett in 1957.

By the time Miller took the company public in 1967, it had twenty-eight papers in five states. When he left it in 1978, it had seventy-eight papers in thirty states, including Hawaii, and two territories, the Virgin Islands and Guam. It had had forty-four uninterrupted profitable quarters since going public. Miller was dubbed "The Great Acquirer," the driving force in a "newspaper acquisition program without parallel in U.S. publishing," as...