On the Way to UPI Art Cushman wearing Bolo with my son Andy After I left Bradford in 1983, I briefly settled back into the practice of law. Joining several of my former Roan & Grossman partners as Of Counsel, I worked in a LaSalle Street office across from architect Helmut Jahn’s nearly completed State of [...]

UPI - Perennial Second Banana to the Associated Press Early Washington, DC UP Office United Press had been founded in 1907 by E.W. Scripps, the owner of newspapers in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Toledo. The papers covered local news in these cities adequately but were at a disadvantage in covering non-local news. The competitors to Scripps [...]

Douglas Ruhe and William Geissler UPI’s new owners, Douglas Ruhe and William Geissler, were young Nashville entrepreneurs. Though they had started out with little business experience or capital, their small Nashville company, Focus Communications, had successfully taken advantage of a minority set- aside program of the Federal Communications Commission and had been issued one low-powered television license in [...]

Moving to Nashville as UPI Assistant General Counsel 8245 Frontier Lane, Brentwood, TN Ruhe and Geissler had made Linda Neal UPI’s General Counsel after their purchase of UPI. They also had decided to save money by moving UPI’s news headquarters from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., and the company’s corporate headquarters from Scripps’s offices in Cincinnati to [...]

UPI Begins Its Descent into Bankruptcy In scrambling for cash to meet payrolls, UPI at this time was awash with highly paid consultants. Disadvantaging UPI’s growing legion of creditors, Baha’i friends and acquaintances of Ruhe and Geissler increasingly began to propose and execute purchases of UPI assets on extremely favorable terms. Major staff cuts and salary reductions and [...]

UPI Sells Its Crown Jewel Picture Service to Reuters Reuters Headquarters, 85 Fleet Street, London By spring 1984, UPI was again running out of cash. Desperate to stave off the loss of control that would come with bankruptcy of UPI, Ruhe had decided to sell off UPI’s crown jewel, its newspicture service. This was an international [...]

Ruhe and Geissler Lose Sway as UPI Implodes Luis Nogales, UPI CEO As summer 1984 wore on, another Baha’i friend of Ruhe, continued to chase payment for enormous consulting fees for an automated accounting system he promised UPI but never delivered. When I joined Kenny and Self urging Ruhe to further postpone payment to this non-critical [...]