By DAVID TYLER and TAMI ZIMMERMAN
Eagle Newspapers
Stewart F. Hancock III, 58, who led the creation of Eagle Newspapers, the parent company to Spotlight Newspapers, in 1992, died at his home on Jan. 15.
Mr. Hancock, of Salt Springs Road, Fayetteville, Onondaga County, was born in Syracuse, the son of Judge Stewart F. Hancock Jr. and Ruth Pass Hancock.
A graduate of Deerfield Academy, he attended Colgate University. He was an active participant in the Central New York business and political community for his entire life. He was a newspaperman, a husband and the father of five children.
Mr. Hancock began his newspaper career as a summer intern at the Syracuse Herald-Journal in the mid-1960s and then worked as a reporter at the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont. After working as an advertising executive in the Syracuse area, he became publisher of Manlius Publishing Corporation in 1986. In 1992, Mr. Hancock led the successful merger of the Baldwinsville-based Brown Newspapers and Manlius Publishing to form Eagle Newspapers, which continued to grow during his 11-year tenure as publisher. The company now has 14 weeklies in the Syracuse area and 12 weeklies in the Albany market. Under Mr. Hancock’s leadership, the company won dozens of New York Press Association awards.
Stew was a very intelligent, energetic and dynamic individual with an unrivaled knowledge of political spheres and the publishing world, said Richard Keene, president and CEO of Eagle Newspapers, who worked alongside Mr. Hancock for nearly two decades. `He was a friend and a mentor and will be missed.`
Those in the Eagle Newspapers family will remember him as the ultimate ideas man. Most days, he could be found behind his large wooden desk in a tattered golf shirt, old V-neck sweater and Eagle Newspapers baseball cap, poring over both the Eagle papers and dozens of other local publications, searching for news and advertising ideas for his company to pursue.
`The creation of Eagle was his brainchild,` said John McIntyre, vice president and COO of Eagle Newspapers. `Stew was probably the person with the most ideas I’ve ever met. He had an idea for everything. And a lot of them came true. He was always thinking way ahead of everyone else ` bigger and more complex than the rest of us.`
Everywhere he went, Mr. Hancock was armed with a red felt-tipped pen and piece of yellow legal paper for his notes. When reporters wrote an article he particularly liked, they were rewarded with a `Stew Star` ` a copy of the story with a red star on the top.
He was omnipresent at community events across Eagle’s two-county coverage area. It was ordinary for him to leave his Highbridge Street office in Fayetteville for a meeting downtown, then head up to a chamber gathering in Baldwinsville before reversing fields for a community event in Cazenovia or Canastota. During his brief appearances at these events, he would constantly jot down notes and line up the movers and shakers for a photograph for the newspapers. Then he would be off to the next event, his day not ending until well after the sun went down.
Mr. Hancock’s contacts were too many to count, and his persistent but affable nature allowed his newspapers to gain access that other, larger media agencies couldn’t. When Eagle Newspapers launched Empire Media, a series of statewide publications, he called the often-elusive Gov. George Pataki, who reserved an hour and a half for an interview. Whether it was a news source or a possible advertiser, Mr. Hancock never hesitated to introduce himself and let it be known what he wanted. Some may have considered him pushy, but his friendliness and familiarity with so many people made it an endearing kind of pushiness that usually left people with a smile on their faces.
His philosophy of newspapering was `if it’s local, it’s news,` and he put that concept to work each day in his work. His gauge of a good newspaper was the number of names and faces in the publication, and he would often count the names of local people in his hometown Eagle Bulletin to determine whether the editor’s job was being done to his satisfaction.
He took pride in being the first into the office each day, including weekends. Editors and managers alike often dreaded the phone calls they would receive from Stew on Saturday and Sunday mornings, telling them to come in to the office to meet him, sometimes before 7 a.m. When bleary-eyed editors arrived at the office, he usually greeted them with bagels or doughnuts, as well as a wire bin full of ideas for their newspapers.
`When I was just a sports editor for Manlius Publishing, I used to meet Stew in the Fayetteville office and he would tell me all about the local sports ` what was going on,` McIntyre said. `He had a knack in the world of sports and probably a bigger knack for politics. He knew how everything was connected.`
He felt that as the smaller print journalism entity in the Syracuse area, the employees of Eagle Newspapers would succeed by outworking and outsmarting the competition. He was a demanding boss, but one who welcomed his employees into his life and his home.
Throughout his life, Mr. Hancock was active in local Republican politics. He started as a youth volunteer working on congressional campaigns, advised several local political campaigns, was a Republican delegate and ran for Syracuse Common Council president.
After leaving Eagle Newspapers in 2003, he started Hancock Public Relations and was a registered lobbyist, representing several businesses in Albany and Washington. His firm specialized in renewable and alternative energy sources, which often caused longtime friends to chuckle at the lifelong Republican going `green.`
Mr. Hancock was an avid golfer, tennis player and jogger and spent many summers in Cazenovia honing those skills. One of his favorite claims to fame was having won the Cazenovia Golf Club Member-Member twice and the same club’s Member-Guest three times. A lifelong New York Yankees fan, he for many years proudly displayed in his office his three seats from the pre-renovation Yankee Stadium.
Stew was a past member of a variety of community organizations, having served on the boards at Manlius Pebble Hill School, the New York State Open Government Committee and the National Kidney Foundation. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Development Association. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Syracuse Press Club in 2003.
He is survived by his wife, Kimberly; his daughters, Kolbe, Annie, Torrey and Mary; his son, Stewart IV; his parents, Judge Stewart F. Hancock Jr. and Ruth Pass Hancock, of Cazenovia; his brothers, R. James of Hopkins, Minn., Christopher of Sugarland, Texas, Nathaniel of Slingerlands, and Jonathan, of Lebanon, N.H.; his sister, Marion Hancock Fish, of DeWitt; and several nieces and nephews.“
