Our Featured Editor's Notebook Column

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Sunday, Sept. 6, 2026

Shed no tears for an end to print editions of The Flint Journal.

Yours truly left employment there nearly a  half century ago when I examined the paper's history, listened to old-time employees about how badly they were treated by management and heard horror stories about how some set out to ruin lives  —  tales that were confirmed by victims when I found them and chatted about their experiences.

A tradition of terrorist style attacks on honest and hard-working politicians and business people reeked on the walls of the old four-story building on Harrison Street that once housed more than 2,000 employees.

The awful smell that reeked on the walls was the stench of big business ownership in typical Corporate America so often criticized as a bureaucratic, soul-crushing machine that treats human beings as disposable units of production.

It wasn't the journalists in the newsroom i despised unless they inspired to kiss the ass of management who obtained their jobs by kissing the ass of Corporate America's badest of the bad guys.

How bad?

Let's start with the paper's strong opposition to the 1937 sit-downer strike at the old Fisher Body plants on Saginaw Street in Flint. The birth of America's labor movement began on that historic ground in our community when so many risked their lives to stop the assembly lines and demand fair wages and safer working conditions.

The Flint Journal aligned closely at the time with corporate interests and maintained a strong bias in favor of General Motors while opposing the union. The newspaper frequently promoted anti-union narratives and highlighted back-to-work campaigns organized by the pro-business Flint Alliance that opposed unions helping people get better lives for their families.

Talking to the old timers who had retired from the Journal had to be done before I could decide if a career there was in my future as a 21-year-old ready to get married and start a family. Why did they ruin the lives of so many with untrue tales in print?

Why didn't someone in the newsroom speak up about it and cry foul? I was taught to stand up to a bully. Employees at this place were taught to stay silent, and stay employed.

"Management ordered it," one after another would explain about all the facts ignored in writing stories about individuals management wanted ruined. 

But why?

"I wanted to advance to management, and that was the only way" one after another would explain with looks of pain and regret on their faces.

Hatchet jobs with the mighty pen done on so many that the reputation of the newspaper became known as the "Urinal" instead of the Journal.

Despite a promise of job security and a promise of lifetime employment and good insurance benefits at the time, my thoughts turned to my grandpa. He came to Flint for a job in the shop. The Buick Foundry to be exact. The dirtiest, most dangerous job at GM's Buick plant in the north end of Flint. He raved about how the union helped him secure good pay. That union the  1930's corporate bosses at my paper didn't want to help. The fledgling UAW hoped to develop and solidify its hold on helping improve lives?

Yeah, that union.

My grandpa came to Flint from the sticks, the hills of the Ozarks in Arkansas. He could not read and write. But he raised a family and joined middle class America, thanks to that union.

I was blessed to grow up in an environment of loving grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and parents. My dad was a successful businessman who often shared stories of friends with reputations ruined because they were trying to "good works" in our community. "Good works" that didn't align with what the Newhouses wanted.

They were the owners when I went to work there in 1978  — two years after one of America's worst enemies of "good" bought the Journal from the Booth Publishing Company which created an eight-paper chain of daily newspapers similar in sentiment and style as the sister paper commonly known here as the Urinal. They paid a cool $305. Minimum wage was $2.40 at the time.

Books have been written about the Newhouses and their alleged evil ways. Their alleged ties to communism, gangsters and public corruption designed to control politicians and control towns. Spewing misinformation and penning editorial positions from a position of hate against everything good people stand for in America.

At their peak, the Newhouse family empire included daily newspapers in 31 cities across America. They took their power to a new level in 1995 when adding  the chain o magazines known as the American City Business Journals  They were located in 28 key big cities. The price tag? $

All the disgusting supermarket tabloids you see while standing in line at the grocery store? Mostly owned by Newhouse companies. 

The Newhouse media holdings structured under New York-based Advance Publishing remains a massive, privately held media company that has sold off or closed many once massively profitable publications to expand into the communications and technology fields.

The company was founded in 1922 by Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr., and its today in the hands of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His son Si died in 2017 at age 89. Son Don died earlier this year in May at age 96. Tyrants to their dying breaths.

No, I didn't care to spend a career working for men like that. 

An example of their evil ways was maybe best demonstrated by the time they took a dislike to Rod Shumaker when he was Clayton Township Supervisor. They published an inaccurate front page story saying he voted for something he voted against. Then they later cited his vote that didn't happen as a the primary reason why they endorsed an opponent at the next election. He lost and a30-year career in politics was over. Evil? I'd say so.

Criminal? No, but it should have earned them orange jumpsuits in my opinion.

I became an enemy as I went into business running a community newspaper and pushed for changes in local government in the southern part of the county. Projects often became newsworthy, and not once was I accurately quoted.  They seemed to always make up something I didn't say. Always with an agenda to hurt my reputation to maybe lessen the dollar amount I was stripping from their bottom line in this market.

I remember one series of stories where they essentially made me out to be the mafia. It was time to sic an attorney on them because I felt they had gone too far. I'm guessing the spoiled brat Newhouse boys were a bit perturbed that they had dumped thousands of dollars into my market, yet were seeing their revenue continue to dwindle in the way of subscribers and advertisers.

My first intro to Don Newhouse came by phone. He called me in my Fenton office to personally respond to a lawyer letter fired off to let he and brother Si know I was mad and not gonna take it any more. I had been misquoted in the worst way in an effort to steal business from me.

I can close my eyes and still hear the echo of fear from the rant of a man I've read was even tempered and didn't scream or yell. Don Newhouse shouted: "Who do you think you are playing with? I'm gonna destroy that newspaper you wouldn't sell to my brother and I'm gonna take away your house, and burn it to the ground.  You don't know who you are messing with because I buy ink by the barrel and it's your word against our word on what you actually said."

I remember calmly dropping a bit of bad news for Mr. Newhouse that it was actually "my words against his reporter's words on tape, just as it will be in this telephone call we were on." I printed a transcript on my front page and proceeded to transform Tri-County News from twice per week, to six days per week with five new Sunday free community newspapers that were distributed to more than 44,000 homes.

A chain of 14 community newspapers was later added in the suburbs around The Flint Journal's home in the City of Flint. They reached 86,000 homes by free delivery every week.

That call from Don Newhouse was a memorable moment in my dealings over the years with the Urinal. But not as memorable as the deafening silence when I explained to him how I had tape recorded his reporter, and him! I've always had a regret that I didn't yell "check mate" before he hung up on me.

But my most memorable event?

I took great pleasure in throwing his little brother Si out of  my office in the mid-1980's. He came to Fenton to offer me a $2 million buyout after I built Tri-County News into a powerful competitor. They had created a Lakes edition to combat how my operation had taken millions of dollars in advertising out of the pockets of these New York elitists.

They wanted me gone.

I always wondered if it was because I wouldn't sell? Or maybe it was me choosing to walk away from working for them in late 1981. Or maybe it was the call with Don Newhouse? Maybe it was throwing his little brother out of my office? Or maybe it was the rant I delivered as I escorted him out of my building? Maybe it was simply all about the money or maybe the fact they despised all the "good works" we were doing in the community with my operation. Or maybe it was the fact that nearly every election where we endorsed against who the Journal endorsed, guess who won?

Maybe it was forcing me to bid so low a few years in a row that our county government leaders had no choice but to let my newspaper publish tax sales booklets. I took delight in losing money to publish these massive publications and insert them into my newspapers, just to strip away thousands of revenue from the evil Newhouse brothers.

I still smile every time I get in line at a grocery store and look at all the "McNasty" titles as I've akwats called them. Magazines that were bought for millions by the Newhouse's Condé Nast group that publishes such famous global magazines like Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired and others.. 

Seeing those magazines in the racks remind me of how Si Newhouse;s face displayed absolute horror and disbelief when his buyout offer was firmly rejected and he was thrown out of my office. My tirade was so loud and voictrous that they probably heard me on Mackinac Island about how I'd finish putting him out of business with his crooked and corrupt ways in my little corner of the world.

In 2013, I got a bit of satisfaction when the Newhouses pulled the plug on allowing the Urinal to publish editorials any more. I laughed at them on the radio for rendorsing two convicted felons and three others who had Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings in their histories. My friend Pat Clawson took it to a whole new level when convincing CNN to laugh at them, too, as an example of the most irresponsible journalists in America.
Clawson was a long-time friend and a Mt Morris native who returned home in his 50's to marry a Flint girl. His research and digging into big stories made my radio show an instant hit. He was once the number one rated TV newscast leader in the St. Louis market before joining the original CNN team as an investigative reporter when the new cable network went on the air.

Clawson predicted on my show, and on national TV, that the elected leaders endorsed by the "Newhouse rag" and subsequently elected would ruin the City of Flint. How did that predition turn out?

The Newhouses wouldn't let the Journal ever again endorse anyone.

As a journalist for more than 50 years, it's my firm belief that editorial page positions help shape a community's future.

We will continue to do it online with our regional daily newspaper at The Daily Gazette.

Consider this an obituary for The Urinal.

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Mike Killbreath appears on Metro Flint News/Talk Radio via The Morning Gazette Radio Show weekday mornings from 8 am until 10 am. He's an award-winning newspaper columnist and investigative reporter who is the former long-time owner of the local Metro Flint area chain of 14 community newspapers. This past fall marked his 50th year as a journalist. He also hosts a new weekend national TV show known as The American Crusaders on cable TV and various OTT TV live streaming platforms.

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