When Victor F. Lawson died in 1925 after nearly fifty years as proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, some of the obituary writers proclaimed him "the last of the old-time editors." He was not; he was in fact the first, or one of the first, of the new breed of editor/publishers that came to dominate American newspaper journalism in the twentieth century. Unlike the great nineteenth-century editors of his own time, Lawson was a business manager, not a writing editor; an organization man, not a flamboyant individualist; an organizer, not a thinker; a joiner, not a prophet. At his death Lawson was hailed as a giant by his peers, but he was little known by the public. He was the prototypical progressive businessman who happened to find his way, quite by accident, into journalism. Because of the nature of the times and of the enterprise, such a man...