Don’t be silent

By Tim J. McGuire

Anyone who’s been to a change or leadership seminar in the last few years has heard the story about the frog and the pot. m m m m m m m m m m mIf you stick a frog in a boiling pot of water the frog will leap out. But if you put the frog in a cool pot of water and then turn the heat up slowly, the frog will boil to death.

In these “crisis” days of 2001, editors are sitting in a pot of water and the temperatures are rising fast.

This column is not intended to be a physics lesson. It is intended to be a call to arms for editors to leap out of the pot to protect their staff, news space, and their newspaper’s commitment to their communities.

The most prominent tale (and it may even be true) to emerge out of this year’s NAA meeting is that a certain publisher was overwrought about Jay Harris’s decision to quit his publisher job at the San Jose Mercury News because of budget cuts. The publisher supposedly ended his diatribe with “publishers don’t quit over cost cutting – that’s why we have editors.”

Editors can protect readers and the journalistic franchise AND keep their jobs. We must not believe that editors either keep quiet or they have to fall on their swords. There is a reasonable middle ground on which editors can be responsible, innovative stewards of the company’s business and still be staunch defenders of our core journalistic values.

Our newspapers are not losing money. Our demise has been oft predicted but as Thomas Kunkel and Gene Roberts said in a recent AJR article, “despite what you’ve heard then, it’s not a genuine question whether newspaper companies will survive in our ever-shifting, hyper-competitive communications landscape. They will. Their genius for adaptation and self-preservation evolved to a level that Darwin would relish. They are that well tested – and it should not be forgotten, even better bankrolled.”

I don’t believe our extinction is in the offing, but the Kunkel/Roberts theory will be sorely tested unless we stop our whining and our hand wringing, unless we stop our single-minded pursuit of the same profits we had in good times, and unless we stop our obsession with “the way we’ve always done it.”

Many former editors and other observers are standing on the sidelines critiquing every move our newspapers make. That’s great and it sure won’t hurt, but it’s the editors on the front line who have to be activists in the debates that are going on at every newspaper.

Editors don’t have to and should not be making headlines with public criticisms of their companies. It’s not smart, it’s not loyal, and it’s just not nice.

But it’s inside the four walls of our companies where the hootin’ and the hollerin’ should take place. Editors must be tough advocates for news space, staff and community presence.

We must reject the arguments that all departments “must share the pain.” The news product is our franchise and if we don’t protect it, when we come out of this long, dark tunnel we’re going to find our franchise is empty and punchless

Collegiality and teamwork are, or course, important at the top levels of our newspapers but that should not mean that editors have to bow to peer pressure to impinge on the news product. Cuts are painful wherever they fall but they should not be equal across the board.

Practically every editor I talk to is beleaguered by the focus on cost-cutting but many are being creative and innovative and many more are being just plain tough. My competitor here in the Twin Cities, Walker Lundy, the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was ordered to cut 10 percent of his staff. Walker stood up, leveraged the Star Tribune’s presence a bit, and argued the loss of 23 jobs down to eight. Competition be damned, I’m proud of Walker and he sets an example for all of us.

I am not so naïve that I don’t realize that my job with a company (McClatchy) which has resisted the temptation to lay people off and to slash news space puts me in rare air. But even here, where there is a tremendous commitment from the top to news quality, the voice to protect staff and news space must be strong, clear and solutions oriented.

Some publishers expect this sort of advocacy. I talked to a Southern publisher the other day who expressed serious concern to the editor who had allowed a bad thing to happen to the newspaper’s quality in the name of cost-cutting.

That publisher, and many others, knows that it’s the editor who must provide the most passionate voice for the news.

So get out of the water before it’s too late and speak up for your reader, your staff and your newspaper.

McGuire, ASNE president, is editor of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis.