Origin Stories
Cox Enterprises, the company that’s dominated Atlanta local media for generations, celebrated the 125th anniversary of its founding this past August.
While low-key in Atlanta, the occasion prompted coverage in its Ohio papers including a rare interview with CEO Alex Taylor.
Begun with the purchase of the Dayton Evening News by future Ohio Gov. James M. Cox in 1898, the newspaper company eventually became a sprawling conglomerate with successive generations buying or selling radio and TV stations, auto auctions, cable systems, direct mail coupons, and Bing Crosby Productions.
“News has become a tiny fraction of that pie chart” the interview prefaces and indeed most of the dozens of daily papers in as many as seven states Cox once owned had been sold or closed by the time Taylor became CEO in 2018.
Today its papers are down to its legacy titles in Ohio, its birthplace, and Atlanta, its headquarters.
In 2019 Cox sold a majority stake in its TV and radio stations to Apollo Global Management suggesting a further retreat from the news.
But then in 2022 Cox, under Taylor, purchased the digital, email-based media company Axios for half a billion dollars.
“You know, on the media side, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are just great journalists,” Taylor said in the interview. “And I believe in them. They’re passionate about this, they care, their heart and soul are in the right place. That’s why we bought Axios. It wasn’t because it was a news company. There’s a bunch of them out there. But I don’t necessarily like all the people that are running all of them. I like our people. And I think that’s what you really have to invest in.”
Axios began in 2017 by former reporters from Politico which supercharged access journalism into the digital era. As much a society page as a plateful of facts, Politico’s Daily Playbook, which Mike Allen wrote, included notices of which congressional staffer got engaged to which lobbyist and which star reporters were spotted at which book launch party. It caused Esquire columnist Charles Pierce to dub it “Tiger Beat on the Potomac.”
(Tiger Beat, now displaced by social media, was a teen idol magazine filled with gossip and sightings of music, TV, and movie stars.)
There was important journalism in Politico’s daily newsletters as well, but it was the insider status that was its mission and appeal. And that drew the lucrative native advertising that made it so profitable.
It’s a business model Axios is built on.
Allen and VandeHei are entrepreneurs as much as journalists and very ambitious.
In that they echo Cox founder James M. Cox who parlayed family and professional connections to keep moving up. From farm to newspaper to Congressional staffer to newspaper publisher to Congress himself to Ohio governor and 1920 Democratic presidential nominee to multi-millionaire and founder of one of America’s largest and longest lasting wealth Dynasties.
He lived the American dream and left an American aristocracy.
Journalism, for all its trappings of public service and being central to democracy, can also build empires.
In his memoir Journey Through My Years, first published in 1946, Cox tells of hating farming and quickly finding a way out by passing a teacher’s exam at 17. He also learned the newspaper trade working at his brother-in-law’s Middletown Signal.
“My teaching experience was never more than an incidental pastime because, to use the old expression, printer’s ink had moved into my blood.”
Access to power, even at the small-town level, was part of the attraction.
“It enabled me to know the leading men of the town,” he wrote.
Journey Through My Years was republished in 2004 by Mercer University Press with a copyright to Cox Enterprises, Inc and a brief preface by then Chair and CEO James Cox Kennedy.
Kennedy fits in all of Cox Enterprises’ disparate holdings, from newspapers to automobiles, in remarking how things have changed through the years.
But, he insists, founding principles endure.
Apart from a single photo of Cox, the 1946 edition includes no photographs.
The 2004 Cox Enterprises edition includes several in two separate inserted sections. There are pictures of Cox’s boyhood, his campaigns, and his meetings both formal and casual with “leading men.” There are also some family photos.
King Albert of Belgium and Lord and Lady Astor, Cox’s (2nd) wife Margaretta Blair Cox, daughters Anne and Barbara, the Cox-FDR ticket of 1920, the Cox house at Trailsend, William Jennings Bryan, Orville Wright, Cox golfing with Bobby Jones, New York Gov. Al Smith, Harry Truman, and Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell.
(Cox would buy the Atlanta Journal in December of 1939, just in time for the movie’s premiere. In 1920, the bulk of the states he carried were Southern. For a Yankee, he had a fondness for the South, naming one of his dogs Robert E. Lee.)
Also, as a kind of succession, there’s a late photo of Cox weeks before his death framed by James M. Cox, Jr. and a young James Cox Kennedy (aged 9).
