Patrick McGovern, one of the most low-key billionaires in the publishing world and the founder of International Data Group, died March 19 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.
He was 76 years old.
“IDG has lost a true visionary and the IT community has lost one of its most exceptional citizens,” said Walter Boyd, the newly elected chairman of IDG. “Pat’s foremost desire was for IDG to make the world a better place through a medium of information technology.”
McGovern was worth an estimated $5.7 billion, and ranked No. 244 on the Forbes 400 list.
Unlike most publishing moguls, his fortunes were still on an upward trajectory at the time of his death, thanks to his belief in technology and his move to stake out the international publishing arena long before it was the rage.
He long ago surpassed his one-time rival, Ziff Davis Publishing. His brands include Computer World, PC World, GamePro and InfoWorld.
For a period, IDG’s The Industry Standard stood atop the publishing world as the biggest ad page generator with a record 7,000-plus ad pages. When the Internet bubble burst, he pulled the plug on the magazine, although the overall company continued to grow.
At a time when most of his rivals focused on the US, McGovern looked at the global picture. He also empowered executives to operate his magazines as separate businesses.
“There were not a lot of bureaucrats descending from headquarters to check up on you,” said Eric Hippeau, now a managing director at Lerer Ventures, who ran the Menlo Park, Calif.-based InfoWorld and worked at IDG for 14 years. “He was a real evangelist for technology and he understood long before almost anyone else that technology was going to change the world.”
McGovern founded the company originally known as International Data Corp. in 1964, selling data to the nascent computer industry. ComputerWorld, which would become the company flagship, was launched three years later.
His foray into international waters came in 1972, with the debut of ShukanComputer in Japan.
One of his shrewdest business moves was forming one of the first joint ventures between a US company and China in 1980. When other American publishers ultimately entered the Chinese market, they frequently sought McGovern’s advice and counsel.
George Green, former president of Hearst Magazines International, recalled how he bumped into McGovern in an elevator in Tokyo in 1997. Six months later through a partnership with IDG, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan entered China — the first American consumer magazine to make the leap.
“He was a great guy, and he stayed out of the public eye. He never wanted to be famous,” said Green, who learned of his friend’s demise from The Post. “He was truly a self-made man. He came from nothing.”
For many years, McGovern would personally deliver year-end bonus checks to all his employees, said Harry McCracken, a form IDG employee who writes about technology for Time.com.
An edition of IDG magazines has been published on every continent, including, in one memorable stunt, a magazine printed in Antarctica.
Today, IDG operates in 97 countries with more than 300 magazines and newspapers, 460 Web sites, 200 mobile apps and hundreds of expos and conferences.
McGovern and his wife, Lore Harp McGovern, donated $350 million to establish the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT in 2000.
He was born in Queens in 1937, and started out in local public schools before his family moved to Philadelphia in his high school years.
He went to MIT and graduated in 1959 with a degree in biophysics, but he developed an interest in computers after reading Edmund Berkeley’s ground-breaking book “Giant Brains.”
That led to a part-time job at Berkeley’s Computers and Automation, one of the country’s first computer magazines. Upon graduation, he became an associate editor and associate publisher. Six years later, he struck out on his own.
Forbes Media CEO Mike Perlis, who ran IDG’s PC division in the late 1980s and early ’90s, said, “Pat ran IDG with a set of 10 core values, including ‘Respect the dignity of every individual.’ Pat lived his life and ran his business doing exactly that in every corner of the world.”