Paul Block was born on November 2, 1877, in Elmira, New York, United States, the second son and third of five children of Jewish parents, John and Mary (Phillips) Bloch (later changed to Block). City directories of 1893 and 1894 list his father as a dealer in rags.
Paul attended Elmira public schools and in 1893.
At fifteen, Paul Block became an advertising solicitor for the Elmira Sunday Telegram. Two years later he went to work for A. Frank Richardson, a publishers' representative, in New York City. In 1897 Block founded his own advertising agency and started his career in publishing. The Block group reached its peak size in 1931 with nine papers. He bought some when they were in or near bankruptcy and disposed of most during the Great Depression. At death, he retained only the Toledo Blade, Toledo Times, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Block was the only newspaper publisher closely associated with William Randolph Hearst. Friends for years, they entered a ten-year partnership in Pittsburgh in 1927. With $8, 000, 000 from the Hearst treasury, they bought four of the five Pittsburgh newspapers and consolidated them into two, Block's Post-Gazette and Hearst's Sun-Telegraph. Block became sole owner of the Post-Gazette when he bought Hearst's sizable interest in 1937; at the same time, he returned to Hearst the unprofitable Milwaukee Sentinel, on which he had had a ten-year lease dating from 1929. In February 1931 Block bought the Los Angeles Express, which he sold to Hearst before the year was out, becoming a director of Hearst's merged Herald-Express. In addition, Paul Block & Associates represented some of the Hearst newspapers (seven in 1937). Unlike the Scripps-Howard and Hearst newspapers, the Block group operated without central editorial direction. Block determined editorial policy on national issues, but allowed his editors much latitude otherwise. A man of strong convictions in public affairs, he sometimes wrote signed, page-one editorials in the style and typography of Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst group and gave them wider circulation as paid advertisements in newspapers in other cities. Preferring progressive but not sensational newspapers, he furnished his journals with an array of news and feature services. Under assignment from Block in 1937, Raymond Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette exposed the former Ku Klux Klan association of Hugo L. Black, whom President Roosevelt had nominated for the Supreme Court; the story won Sprigle a Pulitzer Prize.
Nothing in the record indicates that Block shared the creative editorial impulse of Scripps, Hearst, or Pulitzer. In the words of a contemporary, he brought to chain journalism "the genius for advertising, the business office flair. " It is perhaps fair to say that he was among the more efficient and ambitious of those publishers who ushered in the business-office age of American newspapers after World War I, and that he early recognized, capitalized on, and accelerated the trend toward newspaper consolidation. He died in his apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, New York City, at the age of sixty-three and was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
Paul Block managed to build his advertising agency, Paul Block & Associates, Inc. into one of the larger firms of its kind. At his death the company represented sixteen newspapers. He also achieved great success in newspaper publishing. Beginning in 1916 he held varying degrees of ownership or control over thirteen newspapers for the periods indicated: the Newark Star-Eagle (1916 - 1939), New York Evening Mail (1918 - 1921), Brooklyn Standard-Union (1928 - 1932), Los Angeles Express (1931), Detroit Journal (1917 - 1922), Duluth Herald (1921 - 1936), Duluth News-Tribune (1929 - 1936), Memphis News-Scimitar (1921 - 1926), Lancaster New Era (1923 - 1928), Milwaukee Sentinel (1929 - 1937), Toledo Blade (from 1926), Toledo Times (from 1930), and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (from 1927).
Block was a strong Republican in national politics, but at the same time was a close friend and supporter of Mayor James J. Walker of New York City, a Democrat.
Block was described late in life as a short, bald man with a fringe of gray hair and a sallow complexion. Two clues to the inner man might be his admiration for Napoleon, which he shared with some other builders of business empires, and his extraordinary emphasis on friendship. He stressed the importance of this quality, and he gave the name "Friendship" to both his private railroad car (in which he made three or four transcontinental trips a year) and his home in Port Chester, New York.
On December 18, 1907, Block married Dina Wallach of New York City, by whom he had two children, Paul and William Karl.
