Two weeks ago, I read a second biography about Albert Lasker, The Man Who Sold America. It mentioned how Lasker worked with Adolph Ochs, who owned The New York Times, to free Leo Frank, who had been charged with the murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913. Lasker and Ochs, both Jewish, felt Frank was being wrongly accused because he was Jewish. Learning how Lasker and Ochs created a sophisticated media campaign to draw attention to this case nationally was fascinating.

I’d never heard of Ochs, but I was curious about his journey and how he became the owner of The New York Times. This week, I began reading a biography about him, An Honorable Titan, by Gerald Johnson.

I’m early in the book, but I’ve already been surprised by Ochs’s history: The publisher of a nationally recognized and New York–based newspaper dropped out of school at 14. He wasn’t from an elite family or background. He had to start working full-time at 14.

Adolph began his career as an information entrepreneur in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he sold a directory at age 19. In 1878, he and a partner created a directory of all the businesses in Chattanooga. This was a manual effort requiring them to canvass the entire city house-by-house to collect the information before they compiled it in a book.

The benefit of this grunt work was that Adolph developed a detailed understanding of the town, its businesses, and the entrepreneurs who owned them. His directory became a valuable resource that allowed him to establish relationships with all the entrepreneurs in town and add value to them by providing aggregated information about where to buy goods and services.

Adolph was selling information that, for the most part, was readily available to everyone in Chattanooga. But by compiling it and making it easy to use, he created something of value that others were happy to pay for. It’s not exactly the same, but it reminds me of how Michael Bloomberg took publicly available bond market data, centralized it, and made it easy for people to make buy-and-sell decisions around bonds (more here). The information product is still, as of this writing, the anchor of his empire and over $100 billion fortune.

It’s interesting how these two information entrepreneurs took a similar approach when they started out though there’s a 100-year gap between them.

I’m curious to learn more about Ochs and how all this led him to The New York Times.