Last Updated: May 26, 1999
Printer-friendly version
A note from the president
A meeting of the minds about acting on credibility
By Sandy Rowe
In Anne Lamott’s wonderful book about writing and life, "Bird by Bird,"
she tells the family story of her young brother struggling to write a report
on birds the night before it was due. He had known about the assignment
for months, but hadn’t hit a lick. With books and papers piled high around
him, he was immobilized by the hugeness of the project and the impending
deadline. His father, probably recalling the feeling, put a hand on his
shoulder and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. You have to take it bird by bird."
That’s what 40 top editors, industry leaders and educators tried to
do over two days while launching the ASNE credibility project in late October
at the Cantigny Center outside Chicago. It got messy at times, as you would
expect when you get a roomful of journalists together to wrestle with their
varying perspectives of what ails our newspapers and our newsrooms. At
the same time it generated some of the most provocative and passionate
views about our craft I’ve heard articulated at a newspaper gathering.
A look at the history
Tom Leonard, associate dean at the Graduate School of Journalism at
Berkeley, and Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard, laid
the foundation for the discussion. Leonard, providing the historical perspective,
burst the balloon of anyone who believed there has ever been a golden age
of journalism. The most affectionate relations between readers and their
newspapers was at the end of the 19th century when immigrants flooding
into the United States from Eastern Europe relied on newspapers for acculturation.
But Leonard’s favorite headlines from the 19th century — "Important if
true" and "Probably not true" — typified the reliability of some front-page
stories of the era.
Patterson provided the broader cultural context of trust, its sources
and implications. Trust is cyclical in nature and is at an all-time low
right now, according to Patterson. The good news is that he believes mistrust
of institutions has bottomed out and will shortly head back up. The editors
at Cantigny, not the relaxing sort, were disinclined to interpret his prediction
as counsel for inaction.
So what are the causes of the public’s lack of trust, and what can we
do about them?
The editors at Cantigny talked about some causes already familiar to
you: arrogance and aloofness; the failure to increase the authority and
expertise of the news report to keep up with the rising information expectations
of our audience; easily recognizable factual errors of every sort; a general
lack of diligence in knowing and covering our various communities; a world
view that is out of sync with that of many citizens; and, lo and behold,
a failure to communicate effectively with our readers. The list goes on.
Still, despite the tendency of some people to assume the best days of
newspapers are behind us and to reach blindly for the one new thing that
will make everything right, existing research suggests there remains an
underlying reservoir of goodwill toward newspapers and that the local news
franchise is still ours. The question is how to make that stronger, rather
than watch it further erode. The research for this project is determined
to get at the underlying causes of the disconnect with our public. We’ll
do that through straightforward quantitative research. Additionally, the
journalists at Cantigny urged ASNE to explore newsroom attitudes and journalistic
behavior based on those attitudes and to devise a methodology for analyzing
content to quantify the biases readers believe they see in newspapers.
In addition to a better understanding of the problem, the goals of the
three-year ASNE Journalism Credibility Project are to determine what leadership
ASNE can provide, beyond a general "Gosh guys, let’s get better" and to
provide examples from eight newspaper test sites that will undertake specific
efforts to positively influence credibility.
This is serious and difficult work. ASNE must keep its focus and provide
true leadership in this arena in order to achieve any measure of success.
We are helped in this by the resources of the Robert R. McCormick Tribune
Foundation, which is funding our project and was our host at Cantigny,
and especially by the enthusiasm and commitment of ASNE members and friends
who stand ready to offer their best ideas and guidance as this project
moves forward.
Encouraging signs
I was buoyed by that commitment at Cantigny and could for the first
time see the very real possibility of building an increasingly large group
of editors working on this problem. That is what ASNE should be about:
focusing the attention and wisdom of the top editors of daily newspapers
and journalism educators toward the most substantive challenges facing
us.
Among the friends of ASNE who cleared their schedules to attend
the Cantigny meeting were Lou Boccardi, president and CEO of The Associated
Press; Andrew Barnes, editor, president and CEO of the St. Petersburg (Fla.)
Times; Charles Overby, chairman and CEO of The Freedom Forum; Phil Currie,
senior vice president for news of Gannett Co.; James Naughton, president
of The Poynter Institute for Media Studies; Geneva Overholser, ombudsman
of The Washington Post; Tom Winship, retired editor of The Boston Globe
and now of the International Center for Journalists; Tom Goldstein, dean
of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; and Reese
Cleghorn, dean of the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Heavy hitters tackle issues
Editors came from papers ranging in size from small community dailies
to The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (Michael Parks,
new editor of the L.A. Times, came after only two weeks in his new job).
Indicative of the commitment to this work was that Maxwell King, who recently
announced that he would be leaving as editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer,
attended this meeting when he could have gracefully bowed out. Max, not
surprisingly, was a most passionate and articulate defender of journalistic
values and the need for editors to demonstrate the economic benefit of
strong newsrooms to their publishers and companies. The meeting was far
better for his having been there.
The editors dissected the difficult, sticky and often-avoided question
of financial investment in newsrooms at some length, awkwardly at first,
but ultimately with a passion and coherence that would surprise many in
our newsrooms.
The need to uphold, and in many cases reaffirm, the traditional journalistic
values threaded through all discussions. Much of it focused on newsroom
cultures and whether or not they are substantially at odds with the aspirations
our readers have for us.
Tim McGuire, editor and senior vice president of new media at the Star
Tribune, Minneapolis, and Lou Boccardi, among others, forcefully made the
point that it would be a mistake not to deal with our behavior, in addition
to looking at our values.
Tom Rosenstiel, now director for the Pew-funded Project for Excellence
in Journalism and until recently a working newspaper reporter, strongly
asserted that our newsrooms for the most part do have the values we support
but are increasingly uncertain about editors’ journalistic as opposed to
business and marketing values. "You have become pod people, practicing
that other religion," Rosenstiel warned.
Jim Naughton pushed the point further: "A lot of journalists are looking
for reinforcement in these values."
Newsroom values and cultures also came into play in discussion of one
of our toughest challenges: getting all of us to look more externally to
the world and our communities in defining our approach to stories rather
than automatic reliance on established journalistic conventions and traditional
news sources. This is also a fundamental element in the way most readers
define bias, as an issue of negativity and lack of inclusion (as compared
to the more heated issue of liberal bias).
The need for training, both for journalistic skill and content expertise,
was also much on the editors’ minds. "Vigorous advocacy" from ASNE is required,
said Gil Thelen, executive editor of The State in Columbia, S.C. "We’re
not going to be able to improve unless we have these resources for training.
It’s as essential as having newsprint."
"You need ammunition you’ve never had before," Vivian Vahlberg,
director of journalism programs for McCormick Tribune Foundation advised
the editors. As a possible link to make the factual case for training,
she suggested using survey research that could affirm the need for authoritativeness
in reporting as well as looking at other industries’ investment in staff
development compared to the paltry sums spent by newspapers.
Phil Currie of Gannett also encouraged the group to make the case forcefully
if the research shows we are not as knowledgeable as we need to be. The
data should be the framework for pushing forward the need for training,
he said.
Where to go from here
The discussions at Cantigny will help us further refine ASNE’s credibility
project. But we shouldn’t expect easy answers. The truth is we don’t yet
know what sins of omission and commission have contributed to the decline
in our credibility or how much of it is, as Professor Patterson suggests,
due to cyclical forces. And we don’t know if reversing the tide will help
us sell one more newspaper. But that shouldn’t be the point.
As Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution suggested in a 1995 Presstime
article, if the press has a credibility problem, it should be corrected
not because of a potential loss in the marketplace, "but because professionals
should want to do the best work they are capable of doing."
That’s what the ASNE Credibility Project is about. One bird at a time.
Rowe, ASNE president, and editor of The Oregonian, Portland.
