Observations from a ‘recovering journalist’

Why the media should care more about childhood development, what we should have learned from the 2000 election and looking at the business as a business

By David Lawrence Jr.

Editor's note: David Lawrence Jr., ASNE president in 1991-92, retired at the beginning of 1999 from a 35-year career at seven newspapers, most recently as publisher of The Miami Herald. He is now president of The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation in Miami. He reflected on his new life and journalism recently in a speech to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Key Executives Conference. Following are excerpts.

I am a “recovering journalist!” I loved journalism so much that I never missed a day of work in 35 years and loved it, too, for its ability to reveal wrongs, to build understanding, to make a difference in people’s lives, to give people enough information so they can make up their own minds.

Yes, I miss the exhilaration of a big, breaking story and the moments of great achievement — the investigative series, the explain-it-all takeout, the fine writing that makes one marvel at the gift of it all. But I do not miss the incessant din about FTEs and operating margins. Moreover, I came to want to spend some years of my life in public service, most specifically involving children.

Like many, I went into newspapering because of my idealism. I am as idealistic today as I was 43 years ago when I first made a decision on newspapers as a career. The joy of a life is the difference that you make in other people’s lives. A newspaper has many such opportunities every single day.

These days, I read somewhat differently than I once did (which is to say I read as a reader, and not as an editor). This morning, and every morning every day of the year, I religiously read The Miami Herald (which seems to me today better than it ever has been) and The New York Times (which is, to me, the single most indispensable newspaper in America). And I regularly sample other newspapers as I travel.

From my current perspective, I have organized my thoughts about newspapers into three segments — (No. 1) what I’m involved in now, and why it ought to be important to you, (No. 2) what there is to learn from the recent presidential election, and (No. 3) this business as a business.

No. 1: Why what I’m involved in now ought to be important to you

The pathway to my new life began five summers ago when Florida’s Gov. Lawton Chiles asked me to join the Governor’s Commission on Education. Somehow I found myself chairing the Readiness Committee with a mandate to find out how we can make sure that every child in Florida enters formal school fully prepared to learn.

Back then, despite being the father of five children, I had no idea how important readiness was and is. Just a few years ago, I had no idea of how important a newspaper story this is. Just a few years ago, the matter of brain research underscoring the crucial nature of a child’s earliest years had never crossed my mind.

“Readiness” is not about children learning to read by age 3. The fact that your child, or grandchild, can read at age 3 or 4 or even 5 does not make him or her per se smarter than other people’s children. (Because children develop at different rates, the child reading a good deal later may be just as smart, or smarter.) Rather, school readiness is about children growing — socially, emotionally, physically and intellectually — so that they are ready and eager to learn by the time they reach first grade. It is about the blending of education and health and nurturing in the earliest years.

In our country, and your newspapers, this movement toward readiness should be a major story. There is undoubtedly significant activity in this area in your own state and, probably, in your own community. Put it together, and you have a big story and a story still mostly untold. The move toward universal readiness programs — a holistic system for all children birth to age 5 — is mostly covered, if at all, in a most fragmented way.

Journalism at its best gives readers enough information so they can make their own decisions. Surely we could give readers what they truly need to know about brain research, and how to find good child care, and all the other elements of successful child-rearing.

Journalism at its best frequently conveys a sense of outrage. Should we not be telling people of the outrages visited upon children? Not just the outrages that end in death, but the many more that speak to neglect. The mediocre childcare centers that fail to provide any real stimulation. The 10 million uninsured children in our own country. The millions of children who live in poverty.

You and your newspapers could make such a difference in this. I hope you will.

No. 2: What is there to learn from the recent presidential election?

I would hope quite a lot.

There are moments and matters of which I can be proud — as a reader, as a journalist, as a citizen. I give you, for instance, the performance of my former colleagues at the Herald — its completeness, its integrity, its pursuit (along with other newspapers) of how so many voters didn’t get their choices counted. I want my newspaper, any newspaper, to pursue the truth no matter where it leads, without fear or favor. That is not politics; that is journalism.

So that is the good side. But do not ask me to forget about the almost joyous fanning of the flames of division in this country that I saw in newspapers and, yes, particularly on television. In the absence of reasoned, sober analysis, I still made up by own mind — as did so many other Americans — that James Baker & Co. took a cynical, calculated path that argued against recounts when, in fact, a legitimate and full recount in my state never came to pass, when thousands of ballots were clearly never counted

The partisan tack of labeling Al Gore as a sore loser was so early and so easily accepted by so many in the media, and democracy was not the better for this. (I note as an aside that the vice president and his advisers would have been far wiser to emphasize, from the very beginning, a full recount in Florida ... not simply selected, seemingly Democratic- leaning counties). Eventually, all these matters came to the courts; then the judiciary, too, became the target of partisanship. Through all those post-election weeks, the American people, themselves generally a people who want to be fair, were ill served by the cacophony of shrillness that some called “news-gathering” or “journalism.” It too seldom felt to me like real and honorable journalism.

The so-called journalism was too often personal in a way that was not honorable. Case in point: The Washington Post, at which I was news editor of the Style section when it was launched back in 1969. The Post is a newspaper I greatly respect. Yet the following ran on the front page of the Style section in a piece on Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state: “Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed and lined and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogeneous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid.”

This is journalism? It just couldn’t be.

Or take New York Times columnist Gail Collins’ recent quotation in Columbia Journalism Review about Al Gore: “This is a guy who’d do anything to get to be President.” What cynicism. Is this even possibly true? How could it be?

While we’re on this general topic, who exactly was Bill Clinton and how was he described in the media? Was he the chief presiding officer described by columnist Tony Lewis? “This country has made greater gains in the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency than in any comparable period in memory. Personal income is way up, unemployment startlingly low. Decades of federal budget deficits have turned into huge surpluses. Not just economic but social indicators have improved. Crime is sharply down, as is the rate of teen-age pregnancy.”

Or was he the man described by columnist George Will? Mr. Will wrote: “Other than by soiling the office, he was a remarkably inconsequential president, like a person who walks across a field of snow and leaves no footprints.”

He could not have been both.

I know what I think; you have your own opinion. But each of us can be known for our fairness, and the American public — readers, if you will — need us to be.

No. 3: This business as a business

You are under siege. And it shows.

Your world — the world for all of us — is ever more fragmented. People are running-running-running. They have more places than ever to get their news and entertainment and information. No one in the media is safe. “They said the Internet would change everything,” in the words of a recent New York Times story. But it hasn’t.

Meanwhile, almost anything goes on TV these days. There is the so-called family viewing time. Who’s kidding whom? Everything’s available, including oral sex. And television viewership, even in this land of “Temptation Island” and “Survivor II,” continues overall to erode. Few in television decide the answer is more quality. What passes for “entertainment,” on television and elsewhere, is constantly being redefined — and America is not the better for those new definitions. Like so many other sources of mouth-and-mind pollution, Eminem — the woman-trashing, gay-bashing rapper — flows like sewage in the so-called mainstream these days and nights.

Then there are newspapers. I love them, and recognize that they — and you — do so much that is so good. Yes, newspapers are, in many ways, better than ever. Nonetheless, you are in real danger of losing your place as a mass medium, in peril of appealing mostly to some version of “elites” (which would be tragic in this democracy). Circulation, even on Sunday, continues to slip. Advertising revenue increases built mostly on rate increases won’t cut it long term.

Many of you will do almost anything to hold onto your profit margins — “controlling costs” being a modern-day mantra — but nowhere near enough to hold on to your readers. The New York Times may be able to raise home delivery prices by 11 percent and hold on to its readers, but I will bet you that you cannot.

Indeed, I believe that you will never hold on to your readers — and get more readers — unless you dominate local news far better than so many newspapers do now.

Newspapers are not the only places in much of America to get news from the places where people live, their own communities. TV local news, as shrill as it is some places, is nonetheless good at giving the headlines (which is enough for many people who have lost their community connections, or never had them).

As other media continue to fragment, as other media blur the lines between news and entertainment, the criteria for newspapers and journalists of excellence seem more clear to me now than ever: Authoritative. Aggressive. Substantive. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Interesting. Committed to reflecting the full community in print and pictures. Trying to reach everyone. Helping a diverse people respect differences — and helping a diverse people understand what we have in common. Contributing to a real sense of community.

Today 55 million newspapers will be sold in our country. That’s a remarkable foundation for democratic literacy. Educated people and those who want to be educated turn to newspapers to tell them what’s going on in their own communities. If they are not getting enough of what they need, it is our problem, not theirs. Readers want a newspaper that is useful, that treats them seriously, that respects them and their interests.

We — and I chose that word deliberately — are no longer the first place most people get their news. Truth to tell, we haven’t been so in quite a long time.

But we can be the best place for people to get their news.

Look through your own paper especially closely tomorrow. How much of your content is only available in your newspaper? Where else can people get what they want to know? How can you make more of your content unique? How can you be necessary to everyone who lives on the block, not simply half the homes?

That means local content that comes close to people’s homes and lives. I want, like you, stories that readers simply must read and stories they want to read. Journalism they can’t live without. Journalism that enlightens their lives. Journalism that brightens their days. Newspapers that never back off from what really matters to people. Newspapers that aggressively hold public servants to the highest standards. Newspapers no more unafraid to praise than they are to scold. Stories of people who inspire the rest of us, for we all need examples of lives of good and giving.

Those can only be delivered by newspapers and their managements —beginning with the newsroom but embracing every division — that are truly open to change. The whole world is changing — culturally, businesswise and otherwise — and newspapers simply cannot hang onto the past. The best newspaper leaders will hold tightly to their values, and be vigorously open to all else. You will need to exemplify leadership that gives others confidence in the future. If you, the leaders, do not believe in the future of newspapers, then no one else in your shop will either.

Lawrence is vice chair of the Florida Partnership for School Readiness and President of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation in Miami.