Lawrence said he had "too many irons in the fire" and offered to sell a subsidiary of U.S. News, The Bureau of National Affairs, to the editors for $10,000 down and $590,000 payable over eight years.

"We never did see any financial data on BNA," Stewart would later recall. "In any case, on the way home the five of us decided we should open the thing up and allow employees a chance to buy into BNA. Don't ask me whether this was because we were chicken and wanted to spread the risk or because we were idealists."

John Stewart came to BNA to work on the Labor Relations Reporter. He'd originally planned to teach and had gone to Harvard for graduate work in economics. One year was enough, he says: "You found yourself getting farther and farther from reality." At Harvard he often had turned to the Labor Relations Reporter, so he wrote the editor asking about a job. Good timing: His letter arrived the same day a staff writer was fired.

But the BNA that John Stewart and his colleagues bought in 1946 was an overstaffed organization in need of postwar products to sell. The company had a few lean years, but in 1951 BNA put its first profit-sharing plan into effect: the next year it paid its first dividend. Today BNA provides more than 200 news and information services, including four daily publications.

Stewart became president of BNA in 1964 and led the company during its biggest growth years. The title he most loved was editor-in-chief. He constantly reminded writers that "nobody is going to read what you write because they want to. They read it because they have to."

John Stewart set the tone for BNA, says current president Paul Wojcik: "He stood for so many things: integrity, warmth, openness, moderate risk-taking. Most important, he passed on the sense that BNA is something more than a corporation. It's a noble social experiment."

Stewart saw employee ownership as BNA's proudest accomplishment. Upon stepping down as CEO in 1980, he remained chairman of the board and a trustee of the stock plan. He retired for good in 1993 and died this past July.