Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1970s. On Watkins' watch: Circulation drive, newsroom computers

It was the U.S. Army Air Forces and a wartime sweetheart that brought John C.A. Watkins to The Providence Journal.

Watkins followed in his father's bootsteps and became an Army pilot as World War II approached for America. He came to Rhode Island for training at Hillsgrove, the military airfield that later became T.F. Green Airport. While there, he met Helen Danforth, whom he married in 1943.

Watkins, one of six brothers in uniform, was a fighter pilot in the Mediterranean Theater, flying 49 combat missions. He was ordered out of combat after three of his brothers died.

On Sept. 13, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Watkins left the Army. Before the war, he had been a reporter and editor at the Dayton (Ohio) Herald and Journal, and then the Baltimore Sun. That left him only one choice: two days later he took a job as an assistant to the publisher of The Providence Journal. He rose through the ranks quickly, becoming assistant publisher in 1950, associate publisher in 1953 and, in 1954, at age 41, publisher, a title he would hold for 25 years, longer than anyone else in the history of The Providence Journal Company.

Watkins would preside over monumental change at The Journal, especially during the 1970s.

When he became publisher, Watkins worried that The Journal's circulation was only 40,000, while the company's afternoon paper, The Evening Bulletin, was 140,000. Watkins observed the pace of life changing in Rhode Island, away from mill workers who went in early and looked forward to an evening paper. He foresaw a populace that worked 9 to 5 and wanted a paper before leaving for work. He also expected that television evening news, then in its infancy, would eat into the market for the evening paper.

To stay ahead of these changes, Watkins led a successful drive to double the circulation of the morning Journal.

He was at the helm when the biggest revolution in the printing industry since Gutenberg hit The Journal: Computers and printing plates with a photographic surface replaced the raised metal type that had been used to print the paper since its founding.

Besides his tenure as publisher, Watkins also held the titles of president of The Journal Company, chairman of its board of directors and chief executive officer.

Born John Chester Anderson Watkins on Oct. 2, 1912, in Corpus Christi, Texas, he died Aug. 30, 2000, in Newport.