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Reflections on Christopher E. Bergin: The Shoulders We Stand On

Posted on July 27, 2020

To celebrate our 50th anniversary, Tax Analysts is publishing an occasional series of articles looking back at the organization's history — from reflections on the individuals who built the company, to insider looks at how we operate today and visions for our path forward.

In this article, Robert Goulder discusses the late Christopher E. Bergin's many contributions to Tax Analysts, both as president and publisher and as Tax Notes editor.

I was fortunate to work with Chris Bergin during my years with Tax Analysts. Reflecting on those experiences seems like a suitable way to remember him on the occasion of our 50th anniversary.

As many readers know, the Tax Analysts story is one of humble beginnings. We were founded in 1970 and began publishing in 1972. We operated on a shoestring budget, as it wasn’t initially clear that selling a weekly tax newsletter was a viable business model. In those early days, management was focused on basic tasks, like making sure the electricity bill was paid and getting our publications out the door on time. Long-term thinking wasn’t on anybody’s radar, and it showed. Years later Chris would help change that, providing us with a new home and financial stability.

New Jersey to Falls Church

Chris came to Tax Analysts in 1991, arriving from Prentice Hall, a respected tax publisher that offered some popular research tools. Prentice Hall’s parent company had recently sold many of its publishing assets to a division of Simon & Schuster. What was left of Prentice Hall’s law and business unit was eventually acquired by the Dutch publishing house Wolters Kluwer. Bob Manning, our editor in chief at the time, knew of Chris’s excellent work at Prentice Hall and set about recruiting him. Chris saw an opportunity and jumped at it, moving his family from New Jersey to Northern Virginia.

Christopher E. Bergin
Christopher Bergin, Tax Analysts President and Publisher, 2001-2017

From the moment Chris walked through our doors, Tax Notes was never quite the same. He raised the bar in many ways. Among his first wave of reforms was to establish an editorial review process under which outside submissions would be rejected on qualitative grounds. As Chris saw things, being published in Tax Notes should be a designation reserved for the worthiest content. That necessarily meant some material had to be turned away.

The change ruffled some people’s feathers, but Chris didn’t care. His personal style was to fix whatever was broken, without regard to bruised egos. Readers of a certain age may recall the fictional television character Lou Grant, a hard-driving news editor who demanded high standards from those around him. There was an element of that in Chris, and it was exactly what the company needed.

At Chris’s insistence, the editorial pipeline was reconfigured. He established three distinct levels of scrutiny: a line edit, a copy edit, and a proofread. That wasn’t duplicative, as each function carried unique responsibilities. We soon became known as an editors’ shop, with less deference given to the author’s original language. As anyone in the publishing business knows, there’s a delicate balance between preserving an author’s voice and respecting the reader’s patience. Our goal was to prioritize the reader; Chris never let us forget that.

Among the lessons drilled into staff was an awareness that most subscribers had very limited time on their hands. Their workdays were dominated by the pursuit of billable hours, which excludes any time spent staying current on recent tax developments. It followed that brevity was a news editor’s friend.

Chris would convey that idea by paraphrasing President Lincoln, who once began a note to a colleague as follows: “Dear Senator, if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” In practice, this forced more aggressive editing. Burying the lede became a cardinal sin. Nondescript headlines were banished. By the time a reader reached the end of the first paragraph, they should know why they need to finish the rest of the article.

These policies help explain why Tax Notes continues to enjoy such a devoted readership — and why our renewal rates are the envy of the industry. Three decades after Chris joined the company, the core philosophy hasn’t changed. The readers always come first.

The Turnaround

Chris become our publisher and executive director in 2001, replacing founder Tom Field. During his first day as boss, Chris received a message from our finance director: “Congratulations on the promotion, we’re two months away from being unable to make payroll.” Looming insolvency is not how most CEOs begin their tenure. Chris had to hit the ground running.

Editorially speaking, we were producing world-class journalism. Before the courts, we were breaking new ground in the disclosure wars. But elements of our business model were problematic, and in some respects the company still resembled a mom and pop operation. Chris was determined to change that.

The challenge was to retain the best aspects of the old culture, while ushering in a new era of professionalism. There were some layoffs. There was also a salary freeze. Unproductive positions were eliminated. Duplicative workflows had to be streamlined. Chris hated doing that, but he knew it was necessary for the company’s survival.

Among the first things to be revamped was the sales and marketing function. Back then, our growth strategy could be summed up by a popular movie line: “If you build it, they will come.” The thinking was that all we needed to do was publish Tax Notes every week and new subscribers would materialize out of thin air. The products would sell themselves. That approach didn’t work out too well.

Our early marketing efforts were passive. There was a mentality that calling attention to oneself, in the commercial setting or otherwise, was somehow uncouth. Self-promotion was frowned on as gauche behavior. Tax Analysts had been described as the “best-kept secret” in the tax profession. As it turns out, being invisible to the key stakeholders in the tax community isn’t the best way to grow revenue.

In the following years we tried things the company had never previously attempted. We held focus groups, we retained consultants in brand management, and we developed advertising campaigns. Along the way, we came up with some energetic slogans. Perhaps you remember them: “the experts’ experts” and “respectfully disagreeable.”

One of these early rebranding efforts required that Chris eliminate the company’s original logo, affectionately known to staff as “the weed.” We’re often asked where the idea for the logo came from, and whether it was a reference to cannabis. It wasn’t. The image was taken from the Treasury Department seal — specifically, the olive branch that the bald eagle is clutching in its talons. In some ways, replacing that dated logo was symbolic of Chris’s efforts to modernize the whole company. It can be tough letting go of the past. There’s a part of you that’s sad to see the old traditions replaced, but you realize things need to change.

That was also true for our IT function. The company wasn’t housed under one roof when Chris became publisher. It was more like five or six roofs, with multiple offices spread across Falls Church and the western corner of Arlington County. That presented problems in terms of getting our staff wired on to one network.

At one point, we considered running a series of underground fiber-optic cables through the neighborhood. That project came to a halt when a neighboring funeral parlor refused to give us an easement to lay the cable. The next best solution was to install lasers on the roofs of our buildings to transmit data optically. That’s what we eventually did. As I recall, the lasers were Israeli military surplus equipment. They worked most of the time, except when it snowed. Heavy rain would cause our computers to run abnormally slow. The simple chore of closing each day’s news file required that our editors monitor the afternoon weather forecast. Chris joked that our network was held together with chewing gum and duct tape.

Another point of concern was our third-party licensing arrangements. We realized that a large percentage of our readers were accessing our content via an outside platform. We were compensated for that, naturally, but it made direct sales a tough ask. In any marketplace, you can always compete against your rivals, but you can’t compete against yourself. Moreover, the licensing arrangements limited our flexibility in setting prices. Over the years, Chris managed several rounds of negotiations with our distribution partners and was bold in demanding increased licensing fees. Eventually, the company weaned itself away from those third-party arrangements.

Chris was deeply involved in getting us the building we now occupy. In the early 2000s, the Falls Church City Council approved a real estate development project for the Tinner Hill area. The existing structures were to be torn down and replaced with a mixture of commercial office space, modern residential apartments, and street-level retail units. Chris recognized the opportunity as an inflection point in our life cycle. Tax Analysts could get in early on the project, aided by some favorable financing made possible through our nonprofit status. There were risks, but also potential rewards. The timing proved to be fortuitous. Chris unloaded our other holdings just before the market turned south.

We eventually moved into our new building in December 2006. I remember Chris standing over his desk that day, studying the blueprints with great optimism. His real estate ambitions were always more than just a matter of metes and bounds. The new building represented our maturation. Many parts of the company are unrecognizable from the era that preceded Chris. And he was instrumental in our staff enjoying competitive salaries and excellent employee benefits — which wasn’t always the case. We take these things for granted today, but they didn’t fall into place on their own. Our financial turnaround wouldn’t have happened without Chris’s vision and resilience. We were two months from insolvency. Look at us now.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of our founding, we should remember that Tax Analysts is exactly where Chris Bergin wanted us to be: thriving and financially stable, and prepared for whatever bumps the future may hold. Thank you, Chris. We stand on your shoulders.

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