Unfortunately, for every newspaper-owning family that serves as an effective corporate steward and manager, there’s one whose involvement with the business has become marginal and whose sense of the values that the dual-class structure was meant to protect is anything but cohesive. Over succeeding generations, time has a way of turning the former into the latter. As progeny multiply, so do perspectives and objectives, and without an effective means of achieving consensus, a dangerous institutional inertia can set in. In the newspaper industry, which for the first time faces truly seismic economic challenges, inertia is a particularly deadly corporate ailment, often prompting desperate public shareholders to dump their shares at a discount to super shareholders. If the controlling group has lost its joint sense of purpose in owning the asset, its members are often happy to accept extra value in what for them has become primarily a financial investment.

What, then, is the secret to preventing exceptional family stewards from degenerating into dysfunctional ones? Although there are no panaceas, having fewer children helps slow the inevitable shift. So does setting up effective regular communication mechanisms within the family. If specific values—particularly noneconomic ones—bind the clan, these should be articulated clearly in writing so that subsequent generations aren’t forced to rely on memory or the divergent interpretations of different family factions.

Many cite a family’s remaining involved in a paper’s day-to-day operations as the most important factor in preserving effective family stewardship. But active engagement can prove a mixed blessing. Fewer than half of family-controlled public-newspaper companies have family members at the helm, and as a group, these have not outperformed the others. Unfortunately, the twin problems of incompetent family members in senior executive posts and family members who believe that they or their children are entitled to line positions regardless of performance raise often-insoluble governance and management challenges.
 
Once a family decides to turn to outside professionals to run the company, however, it is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. The selection of a C.E.O. then becomes the defining act for each generation of owners. As the Chandlers learned when they selected Mark Willes, a bad choice can leave the family with little alternative but to sell the company. Conversely, the McClatchys’ decision to hire Gary Pruitt as their company’s C.E.O. more than a decade ago has served to reinforce the family’s commitment to the industry.

But the prime determinant of how long a family dynasty will endure is how well its business is run. Nothing is more likely to spur a family insurrection and provoke demands to sell than the perception that the business is not being managed efficiently. Those who romanticize family ownership are often the same people who encourage policies that will almost certainly accelerate its disintegration.

I witnessed this firsthand on two separate occasions a couple years ago. I was invited to speak at the annual Conference of Knight Wallace Journalism Fellows at the University of Michigan on a panel that included senior executives from every major English-language news organization. It seemed that the organizers could not find anyone else in journalism willing to oppose the position that investing more in newsroom resources inexorably leads to better bottom-line performance.