ASNE - Jay Harris emphasizes newspapers' need to balance public trust with bottom line

Published Friday, April 6, 2001
Jay Harris emphasizes newspapers' need to balance public trust with bottom line
BY JOHNNY LEWIS
ASNE Reporter

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Former newspaper publisher Jay T. Harris told editors at ASNE Friday that his decision to speak out against market pressures in the newspaper industry was not an “act of betrayal.” Rather than an act against a newspaper company, it was an “act of fidelity” to the values of journalism.

“I had watched a long train of corporate abuses against the traditions and core values of a great profession and a great company,” Harris said at the organization’s closing luncheon. “I had witnessed enough.”

Jay Harris Career Highlights:

Before resigning from the San Jose Mercury News, Jay T. Harris was one of the few minority publishers of a major daily newspaper in America.
He started at the Mercury News in February 1994 as chairman and publisher. During his years there, the paper was recognized by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the best papers in the country.
He increased profits at the Knight Ridder Inc. publication and had one of the most diverse newsrooms in the industry, with minorities representing more than 30 percent of the newsroom staff.
In 1996, he broadened multicultural readership and helped create weeklies in various segments of the community. His efforts helped the Mercury News launch Nuevo Mundo, a Spanish-language weekly in 1996; Viet Mercury, a Vietnamese-language weekly, was started three years later.
After seven years as publisher, he stepped down at the Mercury News over philosophical differences involving budget practices.
He took the position that when newspaper ad revenue slows, cutbacks should not start in the newsroom.
Mr. Harris began his career in Knight Ridder as executive editor of the Philadelphia Daily News in 1985. In 1988, he became a part of the corporate staff as assistant to Tony Ridder, then president of the company’s Newspaper Division and now chairman and chief executive officer of Knight Ridder. Two years later, Mr. Harris was promoted to vice president/operations, responsible for several of the company’s newspapers.
He started his career in journalism as a reporter and editor in 1970 at the The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.
Mr. Harris was also on the faculty of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and was assistant dean of the school between 1975 and 1982.
Mr. Harris is married and has three children.

Harris said there needs to be more of a balance between a corporation’s hunger for profits and a newspaper’s responsibilities to the community.

“I worried that in Knight Ridder, greater priority was increasingly given to the business aspects of the enterprise than was given to fulfilling our ‘public trust.’ ”

About 400 editors warmly greeted Harris in the Grand Ballroom of the JW Marriott. ASNE outgoing president Richard A. Oppel called his speech “possibly the most important speech ever given at ASNE.” Oppel said ASNE also invited Tony Ridder, CEO of Knight Ridder to join Harris at the luncheon, but Ridder declined.

Harris resigned from his position as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News on Monday, March 12. He said he had met with executives from the Mercury News and Knight Ridder to determine cost cutting measures the previous Friday and believed resigning was the best way to make corporate executives take notice.

Harris said it was not the cutting that disturbed him so much, but rather the “myopic focus on the number.”

“Little or no attention was paid to the consequences of achieving a number,” Harris said. “There was virtually no discussion of the damage that would be done to the quality and aspirations of the Mercury News.”

Harris explained the chain of events that led to his stepping down:

Harris met with the Mercury News’ management team to debrief after the meeting with Knight Ridder officials. They decided to schedule a conference call on Sunday to discuss the next steps.

After an intense day, Harris said he went to bed but woke up at 3 a.m. with a knot in his stomach. “While I was asleep, the stark reality of what had happened and what seemed to lie inevitably ahead had worked its way to the front of my brain.

“Over the next several hours the idea came together in my mind that resigning was the only way to slow things down, to possibly get corporate to open their eyes …”

On Saturday morning, Harris talked it over with his wife, Christine, canceled Sunday’s conference call, and started working on his letter of resignation.

At 1:30 p.m. Monday, he said he submitted his resignation but not before deciding to “burn bridges” while still at Knight Ridder. He arranged to have a farewell e-mail sent to all employees of the Mercury News. “There would be no turning back, no conversation leading to compromise,” he said.

Harris told ASNE editors that just the threat of his resignation probably would have been sufficient to reach some compromise with Knight Ridder executives, however that was a road he no longer wanted to travel.

“I confronted the fact that continuing negotiation and compromise was little more than slow and silent surrender,” Harris said. “Like many others, I had become an unacknowledged co-conspirator in something I knew not to be a good thing, but I didn’t

know how to stop.”

During his 40-minute speech, Harris was eloquent and candid. He denounced many newspaper executives’ high salaries that he described as “golden handcuffs. And those golden handcuffs have morphed into blindfolds and gags as well.”

He drew a parallel to the market pressures on HMOs, arguing that cost-cutting would hurt the newspaper industry just as being too focused on the bottom line has made it difficult to provide adequate health care for many in America.

Harris was, however optimistic, about the future.

“Today, we hear a growing chorus of brave souls - both inside and outside the industry - protesting vigorously,” he said. “They are concerned about the current drift away from quality.

“I believe that if we are willing to speak the truth, willing to talk together and work together to determine what the proper balance is and how it can be restored, that we can achieve that end.”

Harris stressed the need to give the public a sense of “ownership” of its newspapers. All people with a stake in the newspaper need to be heard, he said, not just the shareholders, but also the journalists and readers.

After the speech, Harris answered a few questions from the audience.

Jerry Ceppos, vice president for news at Knight Ridder “filibustered” the question-and-answer segment, saying Knight Ridder should be judged by its journalism, not by numbers. He added that the San Mercury News staff has doubled, with 380 employees with a circulation of 287,000. That is a proportion, he said, would make most papers happy.

Editors touched on a variety of questions, from speaking out publicly to laying off employees.

“There had been a desire expressed to not have layoffs,” Harris said. “There was no way in my estimation…to get to the number on the table that did not involve layoffs.”

After giving him a standing ovation, editors commented on the speech.

“I think all of the editors that were here walked out of this room with a little more backbone,” said Bill Sternberg, senior Washington World editor at USA Today.

The new president of ASNE, Tim McGuire, said the speech was honest. “They were pull-no-punches remarks that clearly call us to action.”

Ultimately, Harris said, the choices he faced left him but one way to go.

“It was like watching a loved-one commit suicide-- unintentionally.”

Christina DeNardo, Jewel Gopwani and Angelique Soenarie contributed to this report.