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The Cutting Edge: Third-generation entrepreneur’s press clipping service evolves

The Cutting Edge: Third-generation entrepreneur’s press clipping service evolves

Newz Group expanded into its 10th state this spring with the acquisition of the Colorado Press Clipping Service.

The company, which moved into bigger office space in northern Columbia last year, now employs 50 people and has a corps of readers monitoring more than 25 percent of the nation’s 9,300 newspapers.

Brad Buchanan, who founded Newz Group in 1995, had always wanted to start his own business, following a path blazed by his father and grandfather.
But Buchanan, 48, never imagined he would end up in a media business, one that has grown to include his brother, Scott, 43, and his father, Waldo, 83. The three of them shared stories about the family’s history in business while sitting on a couch, shoulder to shoulder, at the Newz Group offices on Vandiver Drive.

Brad Buchanan figured his best shot at becoming the third-generation entrepreneur would be in the telephone industry, because he had experience working for GTE and for his father’s telephone company.

The elder son said he thought he could take advantage of the telephone industry deregulation and wrote a 100-page business plan for a company he named GeoTel, but he “just couldn’t get it off the ground.”

In a pattern developed over generations, he went to his father for advice.
“If you’re going down the road, you’re bound to hit bumps along the way,” Buchanan recalls his father telling him. “The point is to keep driving.”

Brad placed an advertisement in a Columbia newspaper, listing his credentials and indicating he was looking for a business opportunity in the area.

Eventually, he learned that the manager of the Arkansas Press Association wanted to sell its clipping service, and Brad bought it, along with two local businessmen who left the company after two years.

“I saw an industry that had not moved with technology,” Brad said. “I thought if I could transfer from a paper-based business to one using technology we could create a lot of efficiencies.”

They converted traditional cut-and-paste press clipping operations into a digital processing center and maintained close affiliations with state press associations.

Newz Group took over the Iowa Press Clipping service in 1996 and expanded to Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky the following year, when his brother and father joined and, as Brad said, “we were back in the family business again.”

Waldo Buchanan got his start in the business world in the eighth grade when his father, R.S. Buchanan, put him to work changing the tires on delivery trucks at his poultry processing plant in Perry, a small town about 60 miles northeast of Columbia.

R.S. Buchanan, who had a fourth-grade education and was the first in his family to leave the farm, started Blossom Brand Products in 1924. By the 1930s it was so big that the railroad ran a spur to the back side of the building, and his product line grew to include livestock feed and frozen foods. At the height of the Great Depression, he employed 100 people.
After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Buchanan started a beer distributing business and was the first to open a tavern in Perry.

“Buck,” as he was known, gave Waldo a stake in the business and told his son that while he wasn’t old enough to drink, he was old enough to start learning about business. “My dad was very stern,” Waldo said.

In 1938, a woman threw a lit cigarette butt into a bathroom trash can and sparked a fire that burned the Blossom Brand Products plant to the ground. There wasn’t enough insurance money to cover the cost of rebuilding, and the company never recovered.

Waldo served in the Army during World War II, and when he returned he formed Eastern Missouri Telephone Co. in Bowling Green. The company constructed an underground telephone system and a mechanical switch to replace human operators, making connections through a “cord board.”
In the eighth grade, just like his father, Brad was put to work at the company, mowing lawns and cleaning telephone booths. In turn, Scott’s first job was digging trenches for phone lines with a spade.

In the 1980s, the company installed some of the first fiber optic cables in rural Missouri and constructed the first cable television systems in Bowling Green, Troy and Warrenton.

Waldo sold the telephone and cable TV operations in 1986, after Brad and Scott left the company to attend the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“I didn’t want them to feel they had to come back and run the business,” Waldo said. “I wanted to turn them loose. I wanted them to be on their own.”

Brad earned a master’s degree in business administration, and Scott earned his law degree on the same day in 1989.

“It was the proudest day of my life,” Waldo said.

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