Mary Junck thinks the newspaper business is a great business to be in. Newspapers, she said, are important to the communities they serve, making a difference for good in the community. “That’s still one of my guiding principles,” she said.
Now the president, chief executive officer and chairman of Lee Enterprises, Junck received an award for service to the profession from the Journalism Alumni Association during the J Days ceremonies in April.
An Iowa native, Junck was an undergraduate English major but earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She said she had become interested in journalism as an undergraduate when she was editor of the yearbook at Valparaiso University in Indiana.
“That doesn’t exactly qualify you as a journalist,” she said, but the yearbook did tell stories, something all journalism does.
Junck’s first job was as the marketing research manager at the Charlotte Observer; she was later promoted to retail advertising manager. She moved up again at the Miami Herald when she started as advertising marketing manager and was promoted to assistant advertising director. She became assistant to Knight-Ridder’s senior vice president of operations in 1982.
In 1985, it was back to a newspaper. Junck became president, general manager and senior vice president of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota. From 1990 to 1992, she was publisher and president of the paper.
From there, she went to the Baltimore Sun as publisher and chief executive officer, a position she held until 1997. She followed that with a stint in several executive positions at the Times Mirror Company before joining Lee Enterprises in 1999 as executive vice president and CEO.
Junck said she is delighted to live in Davenport, Iowa, where Lee Enterprises has its headquarters. She grew up on a farm north of Des Moines and is happy to be back in the Hawkeye state. She said her husband, Ralph Gibson, and children love Iowa, too.
Michael Phelps, who has worked for Junck for two-and-a-half years, said she was “the highest quality person I’ve ever worked for and one of the top two or three people in newspapers I’ve ever known.” Junck hired Phelps to be vice president of sales and marketing, then added the responsibility of operational vice president for seven Lee newspapers. This summer, she named him publisher of the Quad City Times in Davenport; his job as operational vice president also continues.
Junck said one thing she liked about her job at Lee was the opportunity to work with a whole lot of newspapers. Lee owns 23 daily newspapers — including the Lincoln Journal Star — and has joint interest in five other dailies; it also owns more than 100 weekly newspapers and associated online services. The group’s core is in the Midwest, Junck said, although it also owns some papers in the Pacific Northwest, California and New York.
Under Junck’s leadership, Lee has sold the broadcast properties it held in the past and used the proceeds to buy more small and midsize newspapers. And Lee’s newspapers are doing well, according to a story that appeared in BusinessWeek magazine’s July 1 edition.
Phelps said Junck is an outstanding leader. “She’s smart. She’s decisive. She’s open and speaks always with candor. She’s aggressive. She’s not afraid to make decisions. And she’s enormous fun to work with. She has a great sense of humor and is very funny.
“She’s just a very nice person, pleasant to be around. As a consequence, she can get almost any of us to do whatever she wants us to do, First, she knows what she’s doing. Second, we’re eager to please.”
Under Junck’s leadership, Lee’s circulation has increased dramatically, Phelps said. “We led the industry in circulation growth for both daily and Sunday as of March 30,” he said. And the company’s stock price has gone up, too.
But, along with the rewards, the newspaper business does face challenges, Junck said.
“One is on the reader side” and requires that newspapers constantly improve their product and the way it is delivered. Newspapers must continue to be compelling for readers, she said.
“The other part of the challenge is to do the same with the advertising base,” Junck said.
Newspapers must constantly improve what they offer advertisers so that the papers will continue to have a strong revenue stream — which, in turn, enables the paper to improve what it offers readers.
Junck’s enthusiasm for her job is obvious to her co-workers, Phelps said. “She has a passion for the business.”
“At this job in Lee, she’s found the perfect notch and is filling it fantastically,” he said.