Karl August Bickel

Background

Karl Bickel was born on January 20, 1882, in Geneseo, Illinois, United States, one of six children of William August Bickel, a general store merchandiser, and Emily Anderson.

Education

Karl attended school in Geneseo. In 1903, he began studying history at Stanford University.

Career

War dispatches from Richard Harding Davis so inspired young Bickel that he took a job with the two-page Geneseo Daily Arena while still in high school. After high school graduation, Bickel became editor of the Rock Island edition of the Davenport (Iowa) Times and later was managing editor of the Davenport Republican. He then worked as a correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner. As a result of his efforts in covering the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the Examiner made him a city editor in the newspaper's emergency headquarters. Briefly in 1907, Bickel was city editor of the San Francisco Daily News. He became manager of the UP's bureau in Portland, Oregon, in 1908. The president of UP, Roy Howard, was not impressed with the Portland bureau's productivity and was on the verge of firing Bickel, who first quit to become editor and publisher of The Daily News in Grand Junction, Colorado. Bickel nearly made himself seriously ill working every day in a desperate attempt to make the newspaper turn a profit.

In 1912, he took a leave of absence and went to Florida, then New York, in search of a new job. A friend strongly advised Bickel to approach Howard. Although the two men had a stiff initial reunion, Howard asked Bickel to take over the Connecticut bureau. Howard wanted to stop Hearst International News Service from taking away UP customers. So on April 6, 1913, Bickel became UP's first business manager/sales representative. Not a natural salesman, he had to learn by reading numerous books on salescraft. In 1915, at the height of World War I, Bickel set up headquarters in Chicago and traveled from Minnesota to Texas promoting the wire service. He was named business manager of United Press in 1916. Bickel's close relationships with newspaper clients proved vital to the wire service in 1919 when, because of inaccurate information provided by a U. S. Navy admiral, the United Press wrongly announced that an armistice ending World War I had been signed. Bickel managed to retain nearly all the newspaper clients despite the controversy.

Howard resigned as president of United Press in 1922 to become general business director of the Scripps-McRae League. Bickel became UP's general news manager and was named its president one year later. The decade that followed was marked by frantic growth and change for the wire service. By 1928, United Press claimed 952 member newspapers in the United States and Canada and a total of 1, 150 clients worldwide. The wire service boasted fifty-one domestic and twenty-eight foreign bureaus, and it leased more than 105, 000 miles of telegraphic wire for news transmissions. Bickel built on Howard's work while president, expanding coverage in eastern Europe and Latin America. In 1923, Bickel and his wife went to Moscow at the request of the newly created Russian news agency, Rosta. He helped design Rosta's telephone circuits and newsroom layout and also ordered its teleprinter machines, some of which were still in use thirty years later.

The Bickels' decision to return home from Russia by way of Japan created an inroad for the United Press in Eastern Asia. Japan had just suffered a devastating earthquake. The owners of the Osaka Mainichi and the Tokyo Nichi Nichi were determined to rebuild and bought the United Press's special-report service on world economic affairs. Later, in an effort to gain better access across the Pacific, Bickel successfully campaigned to reduce the commercial cable rates between Asia and San Francisco. By the end of the decade, United Press dispatches were received across China, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and what was then the Malay Peninsula: Indo-China, Manchukuo, and Siam. However, government-based news agencies from other countries were allowed a lower government cable rate than American agencies.

Bickel protested, claiming that this higher rate for private companies reduced the free flow of news. Throughout his tenure as president of United Press, Bickel insisted that government and corporate information cartels dangerously inhibited the free flow of news around the globe. He presented these views while attending two international press conferences at the League of Nations in Geneva during the late 1920's. At the second conference, Bickel secured a resolution calling for world leaders to guarantee press freedom and unbiased international reporting. Of the sixty-four nations represented, only Turkey voted against the resolution. Gradually, many international monopolies began to break apart, including those involving the Associated Press.

Bickel’s book, New Empires: The Newspaper and the Radio (1930), chronicles his enthusiasm. He believed radio could sell advertising in newspapers by providing basic news bulletins then cuing the public to the more in-depth stories available in print. In 1924, Bickel arranged for United Press bulletins on general election returns to be broadcast over the first-ever news hookup of radio stations. Despite that success, many newspaper publishers, including Roy Howard, believed radio was a competitor for advertising revenue. As late as 1931, Scripps-Howard Newspapers agreed to sell United Press reports to radio stations only if the news was embargoed for twenty-four hours. Bickel argued that radio was the perfect medium for boosting newspaper circulation. The disagreement contributed to Bickel's already poor health. Howard finally relented, and negotiations with radio stations for twenty-four-hour news access began.

At age fifty-three, Bickel retired from UP, saying that "the press association business is a young man's business. " His last official act in 1935 was to authorize the selling of news bulletins to radio stations. The next year, Bickel headed Scripps-Howard Radio, Inc. He consolidated all Scripps-Howard stations into the Continental Radio Company and purchased existing stations in smaller markets, such as WCPO in Cincinnati and WNOX in Knoxville. The Bickels moved to Sarasota, Florida, and in 1942 Bickel published a history of the region, The Mangrove Coast. The energy he once devoted to international press affairs was poured into philanthropic work. He was called Sarasota's "one-man chamber of commerce" for his service as a trustee for the Ringling Museums and numerous other civic organizations. The Bickels contributed the Russian icons and Japanese prints they collected in their travels to the Ringling Museum. Bickel died in Sarasota.

Achievements

• Being president of United Press Bickel played a part in establishing a nighttime wire service called United News. This made United Press a twenty-four-hour news operation, intensifying its competition with the larger Associated Press. He was instrumental in starting the United Feature Syndicate, which offered book serials and other information. Bickel also campaigned for cooperation between newspapers and radio. In later years he even established the Continental Radio Company.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The mangrove coast: The story of the west coast of Florida

    (1989 OMNI PRINT MEDIA HARDCOVER)

Views

Quotations: "Newspapers in the future will be handicapped without radio as if they tried to compete without trucks, leased wire and effective presses. "

Connections

In 1909, Karl Bickel married Helen Madira Davis; the couple had no children.

Father:

William August Bickel

Mother:

Emily (Anderson) Bickel

Spouse:

Helen Madira (Davis) Bickel